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EDGEHILL 

ESSAYS 



BY 

ADRIAN HOFFMAN JOLINE 

Author of 

<* Meditations of an Autograph Collector" 

**The Diversions of a Book Lover'* 

"At the Library Table" 




BOSTON 

RICHARD G. BADGER 

turtle (^orfiam ^vtsi^ 

191 1 



Copyright, 1910, by A. H. Jolin* 



All Rig^hts Reserved 






GORHAM Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



©CUSTeTSt 



To M. 



PREFACE 

TO dignify these desultory papers by the title 
of "Essays," may seem presumptuous; 
but by a liberal construction of the dic- 
tionary definition, they may be so styled 
without grave offence, for they are short 
sketches, disquisitions, and experiments. Far be it 
from me to make pretense to the honorable name of 
"essayist." "Essayists, like poets, are born and not 
made," says Henley, and I am glad that he adds con- 
cerning the essayist, "for wisdom, it is not absolutely 
necessary that he have it." That relieves my mind 
greatly. He also assures us that the essayist "seems 
to write not for bread nor for a place in society, but 
for the pleasure of writing." This also reassures me. 
At all events, whether these are essays or some- 
thing infinitely less, they were written at Edgehill; 
not the place in Warwickshire where Charles I. and 
Essex fought their famous battle, nor the rambling 
building at Princeton where years ago lads were pre- 
pared for college, but in a New Jersey cottage on the 
brow of a hill. The atmosphere there is more book- 
ish than that of Wall Street, but it must be owned 
that some essays produced in that financial region 
have been pecuniarily more profitable than their coun- 
try companions. They were railway mortgages. The 
style was dry and monotonous, but it was serious and 
convincing. No one ever disagreed with my views as 
expressed in those contributions to literature ; whereas 
in other fields almost everyone refuses to concur with 

5 



6 PREFACE 

me, except when I am merely "embroidering the ob- 
vious," as a pert man in Life unkindly said In regard 
to a modern essay-writer. 

In the longest of these papers it was not my pur- 
pose to present an original review of the life and work 
of Francis Jeffrey, but only to give an outline of his 
career and to cite some contemporaneous estimates of 
his personality, his character, and his merits. He is 
now little known except to those who make a study of 
the books of the middle nineteenth century. His 
"Life" by Cockburn Is a melancholy monument of dull 
mediocrity on the part of the biographer. Sir Leslie 
Stephen's admirable sketch in the Dictionary of Na- 
tional Biography is far more satisfactory and I have 
used It freely. In recent years Professor Gates has 
published a critical study of Jeffrey as a reviewer in 
Three Studies in Literature (1899), and Professor 
Winchester has added a brief supplement in his Group 
of English Essayists (1910). I have not attempted 
to invade their province. If I have quoted liberally 
from books of gossip and reminiscence, it has been 
because the writers gave a more vivid presentation of 
their subject than I could give by mere paraphrase. 

Adrian H. Joline. 

Edgehlll, Bernardsvllle, New Jersey. 
November, 19 10. 



CONTENTS 

I. About the Bookshelves 9 

II. The Quest of the Autograph 31 

III. Reflections of an Autograph Lover ^^ 

IV. A Certain Affectation of the Great 67 

V. A Georgian Poet 73 

VI. A Famous Reviewer 103 

VII. Manners Makyth Man 197 

VIII. The War on the Colleges 213 



ABOUT THE BrXJKSI JIILVES 

SOMETIMES it seems to most of us that much 
good paper and precious time are wasted 
in the preparation and publication of hooks 
ahout books, variously entitled "Diver- 
sions", "Excursions", "Reflections", "Ram- 
bles", "Wanderings", "Among My Books", "Book- 
Lovers", "Book Collectors", and all the other names 
devised with more or less ingenuity by the tribe of 
scribblers. In our utilitarian age they must often ap- 
pear vain, trifling, purposeless and tiresome. It may 
be that in rare instances they are mildly amusing; but 
when we are deafened from day to day by the cry of 
the superior person that we must be continually striv- 
ing "for the nation's service", with only brief inter- 
missions for food and sleep, and that culture is some- 
thing to be despised because it does nothing to "ad- 
vance the interests of humanity", we are led to admit 
that those of us who give serious attention to mere 
books ought to hide our heads in shame and try to 
escape conviction of the offence of being what Jesse 
Lynch Williams would call "lily-handed dilettanti"; 
useless, futile, as unworthy as the skulkers on the 
field of battle. It is true that indictments have rather 
lost their terrors in our times, because almost every- 
one is being indicted for something, and a man scarcely 
ventures to join a friend in smoking an after-dinner 
cigar lest he be arrested for "conspiracy", which in 
its last analysis, means a "breathing together"; and 
while, as far as I know, neither the statutes of the 

9 



lo EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

United States nor those of the forty-six States — soon 
to be forty-eight — forbid our breathing as long as we 
do it alone, we incur grave risks if we do it in com- 
pany with another. 

This sort of apology is common with writers about 
books. In his preface to Excursions in Libraria, 
Mr. G. H. Powell falls into line and tries to convince 
us that he is addressing himself "rather to the humane 
interests of the general reader, than to what may re- 
spectfully be called the refined curiosities of the biblio- 
phile, to the collector of books, that is, as books, and 
not as antiquities or objects of exoteric virtu, in fine, 
to the book-buyer who is also, and by virtue of his 
office, a 'voracious' reader, even if he be not one of 
those 

^Biblioph^gi, or men whose heads 
Do grow beneath their shoulders' 

from excessive application to study." I am not going 
to make any more excuses; to those who love books 
they are offensive, and to those who do not care for 
books "as books", they are superfluous. 

To be candid, some of the many volumes of book- 
gossip are neither entertaining nor profitable. Hav- 
ing been guilty of inflicting one or two upon a patient 
public — but as the sales were small the number of the 
afliicted was limited— I may be allowed to say that I 
think the popular disregard of them is abundantly jus- 
tified. I encountered recently one of these "Book Ex- 
cursions" which convinced me that the hostile judg- 
ment is sound. The writer gravely tells us that 
"Goldsmith was a delightful author", and vouchsafes 
the information that "Mrs. Lewes (sic) was 'George 
Eliot' " and that Dickens was known as 'Boz'. One 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES ii 

longs for Charles Lamb's candle to examine this man's 
bumps.* We are further assured that "the letters and 
journals of men who have filled positions of public 
trust are often of the utmost value." This book con- 
tains another passage which is more offensive than 
amusing. What shall we think of an author who 
says: "The Protestant Episcopal burial service, much 
lauded in certain quarters, is well adapted to the com- 
monplace ministrations of an ordinary priest, but its 
fixed and unalterable sentences and sonorous but in- 
sipid platitudes are poorly adjusted to finer needs!" 
After that, we may not wonder that this "extraor- 
dinary priest" or, more properly, minister, who is 
probably offended by the "fixed and unalterable sen- 
tences" of the Holy Scriptures, embellishes his book 
with a portrait of himself! Yet the book occupies 
space on the shelves, and is "advertised" as "of rare 
interest and charm". I am glad it is rare. 

The love of books seems to be inherent in some 
natures. I venture to say that no one will dispute that 
assertion, which, as I reflect about it, appears to be of 
the same order as those about Goldsmith and George 
Eliot. After all, what is more impressive than a good, 
sound, respectable truism? How much more restful it 
is than George Chesterton's mocking paradoxes. I 
fear that Disraeli was anticipating Chesterton and try- 
ing to be "bright" when he made Mr. Phoebus say, in 
Lothair: "Books are fatal, they are the curse of the 
human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are non- 
sense, and the clever books are the refutation of that 



***Lamb got up and, taking a candle, said, 'Sir, will you al- 
low me to look at your phrenological development?' " Hay- 
don's Diary, quoted In AInger's "Lamb". 



12 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befel man, 
was the invention of printing." He may have been 
thinking only of Disraeli novels. It may be true, as 
Stevenson observed, that "books are good enough in 
their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substi- 
tute for life," but I think he was only pretending a good 
deal. It is like saying that strawberries are a poor 
substitute for beef. 

A certain vanity possesses the soul of the book- 
fancier. He loves to talk about his own books and 
to parade them with pride; but it is surely a harmless 
vanity. I do not boast of any of the distinguished 
volumes, prizes of the book-auction, but I enjoy the 
loitering about the shelves, even the inspection of the 
backs of the books, often unable to decide which one 
I shall take down for reading purposes. In the true 
lover of books, this habit of wandering about the 
shelves becomes inveterate. When Robert Southey's 
mind and memory failed him and after his power of 
comprehension had gone, he still maintained his habit 
of strolling in the library. "His dearly prized books 
were a pleasure to him almost to the end" writes his 
son, "and he would walk slowly around his library 
looking at them and taking them down mechanically." 
There is much pathos in this picture. It is a strange 
manifestation of human nature that many book-lovers 
do not like to have their treasures taken from the 
shelves by any but themselves. Whether it Is because 
they fear a disarrangement of the order or on account 
of an apprehension of possible loss, it is not easy to 
tell; perhaps it is a feeling akin to the aversion which 
most Anglo-Saxon people have to being personally 
jostled by strangers. The same Southey was sensi- 
tive about having his books handled by a guest. As 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 13 

is generally known, he had a large collection; the 
whole house at Keswick was filled with books, even 
the bedrooms and the stairways. Mr. T. J. Hogg 
tells us that he took out a volume one day as he was 
going downstairs with his host. "Southey looked at 
me" he adds, "as if he was displeased, so I put it back 
again instantly, and I never ventured to take down 
one of his books another time." Yet Southey was 
fond of selecting a book from the shelves and read- 
ing from it, allowing the favored friend to keep it as 
long as he pleased and turn over the leaves, if he, 
Southey, had taken it down himself. As far as my 
own little library is concerned, I am rejoiced in my 
inmost soul when a man exhibits interest enough in 
any one of my books to pull it away from its com- 
panions, provided that he does not draw it out by the 
top. My library is a place which I want to make the 
most of and to have my friends do likewise. As was 
said by John Fletcher. 

"Give me leave 
To enjoy myself. That place that does contain 
My books, the best companions, is to me 
A glorious court, where hourly I converse 
With the old sages and philosophers." 

In confidence, it is not so much the sages and philoso- 
phers, for they are apt to talk too long and tediously. 
Those of us who are strictly truthful derive much 
more comfort from the chat of less serious folk. 
Bacon and Locke, Sir William Hamilton and Doctor 
McCosh, are well enough when some one is looking 
at you, but a few of the French memoirs, or the best 
of the novels are better adapted to the promotion of 
private enjoyment. 

The ideal library room, meo judice, is long and 



14 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

spacious, not too lofty, with the shelves low enough to 
permit of rambling without availing of a set of steps. 
It is not the sort of library which arouses poetic fervor 
or is perpetuated in pictures; not the stately hall to 
which Bulwer invites us when he tells us to 

*'Sit here and muse: — it is an antique room — 
High-roof'd, with casements, through whose purple 

pane 
Unwilling daylight stealing through the gloom, 
Comes like a fearful stranger," 

but that library is not at all suited to my taste. It 
may be well enough for poets, who muse more than 
they read, and whose abodes are not ordinarily in the 
nature of baronial halls, but for humbler men a mod- 
erately low ceiling, with no purple panes, but plenty 
of frank daylight pouring in generously and not steal- 
ing in furtively, is infinitely more desirable; and at 
night I want good electric lights and do not care to be 
compelled to grope about with a precarious and in- 
effective candle. Laurence Hutton's library at "Peep 
o' Day" in Princeton and some others I could men- 
tion, which do not give the impression that they are 
places of show but are delightful workshops, are far 
more agreeable to the real book-fancier. I confess a 
liking for Southey's methods, and my own books are 
scattered all over the home, gathered in every room 
except the butler's pantry from which by a stern do- 
mestic decree they are hopelessly excluded. There 
should be nothing to detract from the bookishness ; pos- 
sibly a few prints may be permitted, but never 
framed autographs. The autograph letter or manu- 
script is a tender thing, to be enshrined in a portfolio; 
to frame it is a desecration; I have some framed auto- 
graphs myself. Every book-lover must be pleased 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 15 

with the description of the library of Francis Park- 
man, in No. 50 Chestnut Street, Boston, where his 
printed books, several thousand, were stored, together 
with his large collection of manuscripts. "Up in that 
study" writes Mr. Sedgwick, "he used to sit all the 
winter months, in the company of his books and manu- 
scripts, while the fire from the open stove flickered 
salutations to the shelves opposite, and the books 
stared back at trophies got forty years before on the 
Oregon trail, bow, arrows, shields, pipe of peace, 
hanging tamely on the wall. * * * From other 
walls. Sir Walter Scott, a lion, and a cat looked 
gravely at Colonel Shaw, Colleoni, Diirer's Knight (a 
favorite), and at the facade of Notre Dame; but pic- 
tures had no great liberty of place, for the book- 
shelves spread themselves all over the room."* The 
"open stove" grates a little on the nerves, but that 
may be forgotten. Parkman is one of the immortals, 
but to me he is especially dear because he was so fond 
of his cats. No library is absolutely perfect without 
an open fire — stoveless be it understood — and a fat, 
comfortable cat who will purr on pressure. Nothing 
but my abhorrence of all discursiveness prevents me 
from here indulging in a disquisition on cats; not An- 
goras, mind, nor the prize-winners at the show; just 
plain cats. 

Sad and selfish as it may seem, there is not much 
pleasure in the tours about the shelves if one is ac- 
companied by anybody. The excursions must needs 
be solitary, and the wanderer enjoys most his own un- 
attended roamings ; I like to have friends roam 
among the books, but I know better than to tag after 



*FrancIs Parkman: H. D. Sedgwack: 252. 



1 6 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

them as If I feared to trust them. No one need fol- 
low me in my little explorations ; it is the great privi- 
lege of a reader to "skip" wisely whatever bores him. 
But for that blessed privilege I do not know what 
would become of us. How little do the babblers com- 
prehend when they prattle about the folly of the book- 
lover who buys such numbers of books that he can 
never read! I know that I am going to utter mere 
twaddle, but I have lately discovered that, like him 
who talked prose without knowing it, I have been un- 
consciously talking and writing twaddle all my life. 1 
believe tnat the phrase about "talking prose", com- 
monly associated with the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme", 
really belongs to the Comte de Soissons.* This choice 
bit of learning I am stealing from an old copy of the 
Pall Mall Magazine. Most of the pretended learn- 
ing of twaddlers is derived from some such source. 

Usually there is little that is attractive about an 
ancient law-book. These legal treatises are dreary 
things, whether new or old, and they repel the "gentle 
reader", for they are books only in form. The very 
modern ones are the most exasperating of all, when 
they tell you, for example, that parol testimony may 
not be admitted to vary the terms of a written instru- 
ment—fifty cases cited in note to sustain the profound 
proposition, — and add that sometimes it may — citing 
fifty more cases in another note, culled from the re- 
ports of all sorts of courts from the Supreme Court 
of the United States to the Supreme Court of Okla- 
homa. This confuses the casual peruser, who will 
worry through life oppressed by grave uncertainty as 
to what the law on that subject really is. The old 



*Lettres de Sevigne (June 12, 1686). 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 17 

books are better, and now and then we may detect in 
them a flavor other than that of decayed binding. 
Here is a httle one, printed in London in 1659; a 
small 16 mo volume, of one hundred and eighty-seven 
pages only. Compare it with the three large volumes of 
"Cook on Corporations", in which are embalmed all 
the wisdom and lack of wisdom displayed by the 
courts in dealing with corporate problems, from the 
seventeenth to the twentieth century. Behold how 
slight a book it is; only the title is voluminous. It is 
by one William Shepheard, Sergeant at Law, and is 
entitled "Of Corporations, Fraternities and Guilds; 
or a Discourse wherein the Learning of the Law touch- 
ing Bodies-Politique is unfolded, showing the Use and 
Necessity of that Invention, the Antiquity, various 
Kinds, Order and Government of the same." It is 
dedicated to 'his dear countrymen' and the learned 
author — he of the "Touchstone" — says: 

"The Soveraignty which is placed in Man over the 
rest of the Creatures is derived from the sole advan- 
tage of his Reason, for in Corporal power he is much 
inferior to many. The Excellency of Reason consists 
in fitting Laws and Politics for our better Govern- 
ment, and the best of Politics is that Invention where- 
by men have bin fram'd into Corporations, Guilds or 
Fraternities, for, whereas other Laws are adapted, 
but for the benefit of Individuals, this has a more 
noble end, and, if it were possible, would preserve 
the Species; and although Art cannot altogether ar- 
rive at the perfection of Nature, yet has it in this 
shew'd a fair Adumbration, and given to man the 
nearest resemblances of his maker: that is, to be In a 
sort immortal." 

In our day we are not given to the belief that 
corporations are quite as divine as all that; but, to be 



1 8 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

fair, the sapient Shepheard was not referring to cor- 
porations as we know them now. The corporations 
of the time of which he wrote were mere infants. Yet 
he does add something which shows that certain ideas 
of our own generation are by no means original among 
us. "These things" he remarks, "are to be known: 
that all By-laws by them made against the Liberty 
and Freedom of the People, as, to forbid or Restrain 
Trade, Impose Taxes or Burdens of payment on the 
people, where the Law doth not impose them; to bind 
a man's Inheritance, to restrain men from suing in 
what Court they please, or to enhance the prizes of 
Commodities to the hurt of the publick, and private 
advantage of the place, are void." So say we all of 
us. He does not assume to declare that it is unlawful 
for a corporation to make necessities cheaper: oil, for 
example, or sugar. That would have been a strange 
thing for his ancient mind; and I am glad he spells 
"people" with a capital P. It was prophetic. So 
much for the gentle Shepheard. I have quoted him 
to show how reverently they regarded corporations 
in the seventeenth century. What was one century's 
meat is another century's poison. 

A thin, rather shabby little volume, in a binding 
of faded brown boards, without a word to indicate, 
as far as the cover is concerned, the nature of the 
contents or the name of the author, ranks among the 
rare, for it contains the poems of George Bancroft. 
The historian, after graduating from Harvard in 
1 8 19, went to Europe as soon as he had gained his 
diploma, returning in 1822 with the Gottingen degree 
of Doctor of Philosophy and the idea that he was a 
poet. He was in his twenty-third year when this 
booklet of only seventy-seven pages appeared, bear- 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 19 

ing the imprint "Cambridge: from the University- 
Press: Hillard and Metcalf : 1823." It is dedicated 
"to the President of Harvard University, the author's 
early benefactor and friend." This President was 
Dr. John Thornton Kirkland. The themes of the 
poems are European, and the verse is dull, formal and 
stilted. It is said that Bancroft in after days en- 
deavored to suppress the book and that a large num- 
ber of copies were burned at the house of Prescott. 
Donald G. Mitchell calls attention to the fact that 
the copy in the Lenox Library "shows numerous inter- 
lineations and emendations in the script of the author, 
as if he had once intended a revised reprint." He was 
wise to abandon the intention, if he ever had iu What- 
ever talent he may have possessed, it was not poetic. 
Bancroft was a politician, and with all his affectations 
and highly developed self-appreciation, was a man 
of distinction, a stately figure in his later years. The 
History, written in the old-fashioned way, shows great 
research and conscientious labor, but, after all, it is 
practically obsolete although the latest edition was 
published only a quarter of a century ago. I question 
whether it is read now to any greater extent than are 
the histories of Hume and Smollett. He loved sonor- 
ous sentences and solemn platitudes. It is difficult to 
imagine a modern historian adorning his tale with 
such a purple patch as this, for example: 

"What though thought is invisible and even when 
effective, seems as transient as the wind that raised 
the cloud? It is yet free and indestructible; can as 
little be bound in chains as the aspiring flame, and 
when once generated, takes Eternity for its Guar- 
dian."* 

*History, I, 112. 



20 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

It might be said that his prose was poetic and his 
poetry prosy. He begins a "Farewell to Switzerland'* 
thus : 

"Land of the brave I land of the free! farewell I 
Thee nature moulded in her wildest mood, 
Scooped the deep glen, and bade the mountains swell 
O'er the dark belt of arrow tannen wood." 

After this exhibition of scooping Nature, we en- 
counter a stanza which cannot be surpassed, I think, 
in the records of literature. 

"With my own hands 'twas sweet to climb the crag, 
Upborne and nourished by the mountain air, 
While the lean mules would far behind me lag, 
The fainting sons of indolence that bear." 

The spectacle of Mr. Bancroft, climbing a crag by his 
hands, unsupported by legs but sustained by air, fol- 
lowed by a number of emaciated mules and several 
fainting "molly-coddles" would certainly have aroused 
deep and soul-stirring emotions in the bosom of the 
beholders. 

Is It surprising that when years had brought wis- 
dom, he endeavored to cancel the edition? I was on 
the point of saying that these poems were not much 
worse than those which Americans usually produced 
in the early part of the nineteenth century; but, on re- 
flection, I will not go as far as that: nothing was ever 
quite as bad. unless it may be the work of Alfred 
Austin, of our own time and in another land than 
ours. 

Yet for this book I paid a sum which would 
have purchased for me several well-bound sets of the 
six volume History. I have called It "rare"; and In 
one sense it is a "rarity", although it is not one upon 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 21 

which a learned book-expert would confer that title. 
"It is hardly necessary" Mr. Powell writes in his Ex- 
cursions in Libraria, "to observe that as the mere un- 
frequent occurrence of a phenomenon is no index of 
its importance, so the fact that a particular book, or 
any other given chattel, is seldom to be seen is no evi- 
dence of its intrinsic value — should in fact be rather 
the reverse, proportionally to our belief in the intel- 
ligence of mankind, although the rarity of a book, 
again, must be distinguished from the difficulty of ob- 
taining it"; and he adds, quoting from the Axiomata 
Specialia prefixed to Vogt's Catalogus Historico-Criti- 
cus Lihrorum Rariorum, that rarity is by itself no 
proof of value, some of the worst and some of the 
most worthless books being the most difficult to pro- 
cure. Strictly speaking, the record of the early indis- 
cretion of Bancroft, historian and cabinet minister, is 
a "curiosity" rather than a "rarity" in the peculiar 
"lingo" of the bibliophile. 

In wandering from shelf to shelf we find our minds 
straying also in a pleasant, aimless way; and the copy 
of Boaden's edition of Garrick's Correspondence re- 
calls to our thoughts 

"The laughter-loving dame, 
A matchless actress, Clive her name" 

the energetic Kitty, Garrick's "Pivey", who used to 
grow angry with the great David and when he of- 
fended her, as he frequently did, "would drive him 
about the house like a terrier after a rat, and abuse 
him to his face, till he was completely dumfounded." 
In one of those modern compilations of biography 
which seem to be so popular in England, and which, 
although not always absolutely trustworthy, are cer- 



22 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

tainly quite entertaining, we find an example of what 
some one calls "the evolution of the bon motJ' In a 
sketch of John Hay published in Putnam's Magazine 
for June, 1909, the tale is told that the brilliant Sec- 
retary, who had been the victim of a faithless re- 
porter, was applied to by the same man for certain in- 
formation, not for publication. When Hay demurred, 
the reporter said, "I would not violate your confi- 
dence for the world". "Not for the World, per- 
haps," said Hay, "but you did for the Journal. 

The records show that the substance of this merry 
jest is upwards of a hundred and fifty years old. In 
1753 Florace Walpole sent to a friend a copy of Top- 
ham's paper. The World, in which was an article 
supposed to reflect upon himself, saying: "I met 
Mrs. Clive two nights ago, and told her I had been in 
the meadows, but would walk there no more, for 
there was all the world. 'Well', says she, 'and don't 
you like the World? I hear it was very clever last 
Thursday.'"* 

Occupying places not far from the customary habi- 
tat of the "Comedy Queens" are the two volumes of 
the English edition of "Mrs. Brookfield and Her 
Circle" which was greeted with such loud acclaims of 
praise when it appeared a few years ago, but which I 
have the bad taste to dislike exceedingly. Such a col- 
lection of pure bibble-babble is seldom to be met in 
the literature of our language. Thackeray's letters 
cannot escape being of interest, although most of these 
are disappointing; really the pretty portrait of Jane 
Octavia Brookfield, prefixed to the first volume, Is 
the best thing in it. But William Henry Brookfield! 



*FyvIe's Comedy Queens of the Georgian Era, 97-98. 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 23 

No wonder that Jane flirted wildly with the Great 
Snob ! Why in the name of the deity who protects 
us against bores, if any such deity exists, were William 
Henry's silly epistles inflicted upon us? I open at 
random and find such glorious passages as these : 

"On Thursday morning next — oh, where is Caro- 
line? I breakfast— where???? At the Burlington? 
No. At Lord Lansdowne's? Pooh! With JNO? 
Pshaw! Upon Perigord pie and omelette aux fines 
herhes? Du tout! With Lord John? Wheu! Bis- 
hop of St. David's? Never! With Prince Albert? 
Pish! With Rogers? I can hardly frame my guess- 
ing lips to utter— Yes ! I hope he will 'behave well' 
— that is that he will not pick his teeth with my fork, 
etc." 

The man was always chattering about his break- 
fast. Who, pray, cares a jot about his breakfast? 
There is an unpleasant savor of vulgarity in his refer- 
ence to Rogers, scarcely becoming in a clergyman of 
the church of England and the husband of Jane Oc- 
tavia. 

There are revelations of Thackeray which confirm 
the impression that the eminent novelist was not al- 
ways considerate of other and minor literary lights. 
We all know of his cruel and heartless treatment of 
poor Edmund Yates; and notwithstanding his some- 
what intimate association with William Harrison 
Ainsworth, he and his little circle of worshippers take 
no pains to hide their contempt for the lesser novelist 
who deserved better treatment and while he was not 
as great as Thackeray was a gentleman and had many 
more generous qualities. We find Thackeray writing 
from Paris to Mrs. Brookfield in 1849:— "W. H. 
Ainsworth is here. We dined next each other at the 
3 Freres yesterday, and rather fraternized. He 



24 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

showed a friendly disposition I thought, and a desire 
to forgive me my success, but beyond a good-humoured 
acquiescence in his good will, I don't care." The de- 
voted female, falling in with the mood of her distin- 
guished friend, answers a few days later: "I am 
amused at your having Mr. Ainsworth at Paris — he 
was at Venice when we were there, and was always 
called 'Tiger or Tig' by Uncle Hallam, who did not 
know who he was till he came up one day and proffered 
the hand of fellowship to Uncle H. on the ground of 
their mutual authorship. 'I am Mr. Ainsworth', as 
if he had been Herschel at the least, and we sat to- 
gether in the Place St. Mark, eating ices and discuss- 
ing you, and I recollect saying you had 'such an af- 
fectionate nature', which Mr. Ainsworth made me re- 
peat about 3 times, pretending not to hear, and I felt 
I had thrown pearls before swine and been unneces- 
sarily frank in my praise of you, and began to think 
he might very possibly have a feeling of jealousy 
about you as an author, tho' it would be ludicrously 
presumptuous in him — as of all detestable writing, his 
is the worst, I think." One scarcely knows what most 
to admire in this effusion — the delightful humor of 
"Uncle Hallam", or the scorn of the lady because the 
poor creature said "I am Mr. Ainsworth" — rather a 
natural remark under the circumstances. As nobody 
'knew who he was' when he violated all the canons 
of British propriety by presuming to speak to some 
of his countrymen, he seems to have been justified in 
giving his real name and not a fictitious one. When 
Mrs. Brookfield made her profound remark about 
Thackeray's "affectionate nature", we may not won- 
der that Ainsworth, who knew well that Thackeray 
had nothing of the sort, asked to have it repeated. 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 25 

He was enjoying a little fun under disadvantageous 
conditions. At all events, however greatly Mrs. Brook- 
field may have despised him, the author of "Jack 
Sheppard" had no reason to be ashamed of the rec- 
ord of his private life. 

The flood of biographies which flows from our 
presses contains few better works than the Life of 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, by Mr. Greenslet, who is a 
model for his kind, never wearying the reader by the 
customary padding, but making us wish that there 
was more. An agreeable and successful career was 
that of Aldrich, a true artist, who kept his youth won- 
derfully. There is not a dull line in his letters, and 
his literary judgments are clear, just and positive. 
Delicious are his remarks to the telescope-man on the 
Common about "seeing Venus naked to the visible 
eye" and to the Hibernian election-oflicer in Boston 
who asked him "Can you read the Declaration of In- 
dependence"— "I can, sor; Whin in the coorse of hu- 
man evints", etc. He touches a chord of sympathy 
when he speaks of some of Carlyle's labored scold- 
ings as "the incoherent and explosive pages of the 
sour Thomas", and it is refreshing to read his letter 
to Woodberry in 1892 when he says of his country- 
men: "They were a promising race, they had such 
good chances, but their politicians would coddle the 
worst elements for votes, and the newspapers would 
appeal to the slums for readers" ; and he quotes Kip- 
ling on the government of New York— "a despotism 
of the alien, by the alien, for the alien, tempered with 
occasional insurrections of decent folk." A nation 
rejoicing in its Roosevelts, its Bryans and its Hearsts 
may not relish such mollycoddlish sentiments, but 



2 6 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

down in the hearts of thoughtful men dwells a 
conviction that Aldrich was not far wrong. My good 
friend of the Hartford Courant did me the honor to 
say not long ago that I was "a little insane" and that 
I am "never so sure and never so offensive as when I 
am wrong." That pleases me greatly. As the American 
says in the Boy at Mughy, "I larf." 

In a very accessible corner of the library, where 
are assembled some of the especial favorites — an An- 
drew Lang or two, some small volumes of Lowell, a 
book of Donald Mitchell, some of Brownell's studies, 
and examples of the charming art of Henry Van 
Dyke, Bliss Perry, and the gentle Doctor Crothers— is 
the small collection of essays which Woodrow Wilson 
called "Mere Literature" before he became a particu- 
larly polemical President of an excellent University. 
A year or so ago in a speech delivered before an array 
of attentive bankers, he said that he had been im- 
pressed by the fact that formerly, after-dinner speak- 
ers never ventured to say anything very serious, but 
felt obliged to pursue the jocose: while now, the peo- 
ple expected more serious things. It may be so, and 
the endless stream of feeble stories has become un- 
welcome, but I doubt whether, after dinner, we are 
fit for anything but pleasant discourses about ordi- 
nary topics, or in a state of mind appropriate for the 
absorption of lectures on subjects of grave moment. We 
can dispense with the anecdotes, although I observe 
that Doctor Wilson usually has at least three that are 
well worth listening to, and they are always adminis- 
tered early in the discourse in order to sugar the pill of 
profundity. There is ground for the belief that a good 
many of us pretend that we want solid instruction after 
dinner without being really very hungry for it. I recall 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 27 

the puzzled expression of a jovial throng last winter 
when an excellent speaker and eminent citizen talked 
about the hook-worm and the boll-weevil: and I saw 
the house suddenly emptied on a warm summer after- 
noon when a dear old doctor of divinity began by 
saying to a perspiring audience of' alumni: "I will 
now call your attention to a few of the by-products of 
Christianity in Siam." The truth is that the after- 
dinner speech, whether grave or gay, pleases the 
hearers most when it is condensed within the limits 
of reasonable brevity. 

We are straying from the shelves to the dinner- 
table. I plead guilty to the charge of "rambling along 
with the irresponsibility and indirection of a child 
playing hookey," preferred by my friend of the Hart- 
ford Courant, who called me "an ass", which caused 
me to exclaim with the amiable Hebrew who was de- 
nounced as "a thief, a liar and a scoundrel," — "But out- 
side of that, I'm all right, aind I?" 

This half red-morocco bound post-octavo bearing 
the title "The Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold" 
by his son Blanchard Jerrold, — a presentation copy to 
Charles Dickens with an inscription mentioning it as 
"the first perfect copy"— is a reminder of a witty and 
attractive personality, whose memory as an author is 
vanishing despite "Black Eyed Susan" and "Mrs. 
Caudle's Curtain Lectures", and remains chiefly be- 
cause of spoken jests, many of them mythical; but its 
value to me comes especially from its association with 
a man of fine qualities and of a noble nature, from 
whose library it passed into my possession. The im- 
pulse comes to me to speak of a life-long friend, well- 
known at the bar of New York, with whom no one 
ever came into personal relations without respect and 



2 8 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

admiration. Not long after his lamented death, his 
books, gathered with an affectionate and discriminat- 
ing judgment, were sold at auction. Knowing how he 
loved them, it gave me a shock of pain to have them 
exposed at public vendue. The catalogue of them 
did not afford many examples of the ancient lumber 
of the bibliophile— those treasures dear to old Dib- 
din and sacred to the book-loving antiquary, rever- 
enced by the few, but not as comfortable to live with 
as some of the moderns. Palaeontological relics have 
their value, but the human interest of Thackeray, of 
Dickens, of Leigh Hunt, of Walter Scott, and of his 
most dissimilar fellow novelist, Tobias Smollett, is 
more attractive to those who lay no claim to the title 
of expert. We cannot all be Charles Lambs, running 
home at night in ecstasy because we happen to have a 
darling Beaumont and Fletcher folio under our arms; 
nor can we all be Pierpont Morgans with Caxtons 
crcvding our shelves. My friend, modest almost to 
diffidence, v/as not a collector of Caxtons or of folio 
Shakespeares, and he made no pretense of familiar 
acquaintance with early examples although he knew 
more about them than most people do. He gathered 
around him. only what appealed most strongly to his 
individual taste; and in that he was of my own sort, 
although I follow him hand passibiis aeqids. In the 
catalogue of his possessions the lover of books dwells 
fondly on the long list of Thackerays, embracing the 
Flore et Zephyre and the Second Funeral of Napo- 
lean; the Dickens items; the first editions of Leigh 
Hunt, unjustly remembered as the original of Harold 
Skimpole; the Cruikshanks, recalling the "crank" who 
thought he wrote Oliver Twist and was sure that he 
created Ainsworth; the Scotts, with their treasures of 



ABOUT THE BOOKSHELVES 29 

autograph letters, which particularly amuse me be- 
cause their owner used to make fun of my autographs; 
the tall copy of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, re- 
minding us of the man who said that he preferred it in 
the original binding; the Swifts, the early Tennysons, 
and also the Surtees and the memoirs of that reckless 
''old sport", John Mytton, who would be impossible 
In this century and who ought to have been Impossible 
in any civilized country. It is not uninteresting 
to note that In the translation of the Memoirs of Cas- 
anova there are "several sections loose". In short, 
the catalogue described the collection made by a man 
of culture, not because of a fondness for some special 
subject or of a devotion to the accumulation of rari- 
ties merely on account of their rareness, but because 
they pleased him. To the auction block we must all 
come at last, I fancy; such is the fate of the collections 
we spend our lives in making. We may only hope 
that some of the things we loved may pass into the 
hands of those who will be as fond of them as we 
were, and who may find added worth in them because 
they were once the objects of our affection. 

But the prospect of the inevitable dispersion of the 
assembled companions does not sadden my little tours 
about the book-shelves. 

"All round my room my silent servants wait — 
My friends In every season, bright and dim : 
Angels and seraphim 
Come down and murmur to me, 

Sweet and low 
And spirits of the skies all come and go 

Early and late." 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 

SOME years ago a gentleman who described 
himself as an "autographomaniac" and who 
manifestly possessed what Sir William Gil- 
bert called *'a pretty taste for paradox,'' 
took up the cudgels in the Independent, on 
behalf of the unpopular persons who "write for auto- 
graphs," and while he confessed that his pursuit was 
"shocking," he was brave enough to declare that he 
was "willing to take the consequences." I fully agree 
with him in his characterization of the nefarious habit, 
and am willing to submit his case, as he makes it, to 
the tribunal of public opinion, without argument on 
behalf of the respondent. He is welcome to the con- 
sequences, whatever they may be. I suspect that his 
screed was not meant to be taken very seriously, and 
that he was emulating DeQuincey's treatise on "Mur- 
der as a Fine Art." He has incited me to utter a few 
more words about autographs, because he did me the 
honor to say: "Such distinguished collectors as Dr. G. 
Birkbeck Hill and Mr. Adrian Joline turn up their 
noses at my kind," and he made some jocose but un- 
worthy reflections upon my method of cultivating my 
hobby. He betrayed himself as not a real collector, 
as only an amateur, who had not approached the 
shrine with proper reverence and preparation. Dr. 
Birkbeck Hill was in his life time a scholar and a 
clever literary man, devoted to the altar of Samuel 
Johnson, and he wrote a pleasant book called "Talks 
About Autographs," but he was not a collector in the 

31 



32 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

ordinary acceptation of the term, and I am by no 
means a "distinguished collector," although I thank 
the Maniac for conferring upon me a title as honorable 
as it is undeserved. What amused me most about 
the ravings of the Maniac was the assertion that col- 
lectors of my own way of thinking buy at auctions 
and through dealers "dry-as-dust letters written for 
the most part by men long since gone to their fathers," 
while the "pestilential nuisances," to borrow another 
Gllbertian phrase, confine their attention to the auto- 
graphs of the living, and especially prize the peppery 
responses they receive from persecuted greatness. It 
reminds us of the ancient fable about the Oxford 
guide who exhibited to his party the eminent Jowett, 
the noted head of Balliol College, wrathful and in- 
dignant at the assault upon his study window, and of 
the individual whose favorite boast was that he had 
been soundly kicked by a Royal Duke. "Such and so 
various are the tastes of men." 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in his Ponkapog Papers, 
speaks of "the average autograph hunter with his 
purposeless insistence" — "the innumerable unknown 
who 'collect' autographs as they would postage 
stamps, with no interest in the matter beyond the de- 
sire to accumulate as many as possible." He relates 
a story of a fellow-author (I suspect it was Aldrich 
himself) who was asked by a bereaved widow and 
mother to copy for her some lines from his poem on 
the death of a child, to comfort her for the loss of her 
little girl. Two months later he found his manuscript 
with a neat price attached to It in a second-hand book 
shop. I am well pleased to be excluded from that class 
of autograph hunters and I do not envy the Maniac 
who cares to array himself in such unworthy company. 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 33 

We occasionally buy the letters of the living, and 
some years ago the newspapers were quite stirred up 
by the sale of a letter from the late Edward VII. — then 
Prince of Wales — to Mrs. Langtry, for the respecta- 
ble price of ninety dollars. Even the journals which 
make pretensions to decency and good taste broke 
forth in clamor, one of them sneering at the alleged 
value of collecting as a preservative of literary and 
historical treasures, and another announcing with 
oracular finality that the incident proved the "snob- 
bishness" of collectors. All these deductions based 
upon insufficient premises are the offspring of imper- 
fect intelligence and the evidence of that tendency to 
hasty judgment which marks the utterances of the un- 
informed and unreflecting person. The chances are 
that the bidder was unconsciously competing, through 
an agent, with some rival who had given an order 
without a limit; or that the owner was making what is 
known in Wall Street as a "washed sale" in order to 
establish a market price for a number of similar speci- 
mens of royal autography. I heard a rumor that a 
faithless maid of the famous actress stole a quantity 
of letters from her mistress, and that the vendee was 
endeavoring to "realize" on the ill-gotten booty. But 
whether these conjectures are well founded or not, it 
is certainly quite easy to understand why a letter from 
so distinguished a personage, to a noted beauty, an 
ornament of the stage, should possess an interest for a 
collector wholly apart from any element of snobbish- 
ness. Nothing is more delusive than the auction price 
of books or autographs. Long ago at a Philadelphia 
sale, a lot of Trumbull's sketches for his great pic- 
ture of the Battle of Princeton was oiffered, and I 
instructed an agent to buy one or more, fixing a limit 



34 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

on the whole or any part. It happened that my friend 
Junius— not the author of the famous letters— wanted 
those very sketches, and as a result of my uninformed 
and unwise competition, they cost him about $800 al- 
though they would have been dear at half that sum. 
This circumstance convinced me that it is a mistake to 
estimate real value by casual auction prices. 

Before me lies a faded pamphlet, a copy of "The 
Athenaeum, or Spirit of the English Magazines," 
published in Boston, on January i, 1828, containing 
articles unblushingly appropriated from British peri- 
odicals in the days when our own were feeble, few and 
far between. Among them is one on "Autographs," 
beginning with these words: "In direct opposition to 
the established maxim, 'A living dog is better than a 
dead lion,' the autograph of a dead man is better 
than that of a living one; indeed, the longer a man 
has been dead, the better the autograph." The genial 
Maniac — who is not as mad as he pretends to be — 
may whimsically dispute this proposition, but it is an 
eternal verity, far beyond the power of any of us to 
controvert successfully. As with the pictures of the 
famous artists, the price increases when the source of 
supply is cut off, and the value is measured by the 
price. 

I am glad to have my friend draw upon himself 
the lightning of great men's wrath, because some day 
the thunderers will be dead, and his specimens, heroi- 
cally gathered In defiance of their indignant bolts, will 
be lovingly cherished by disciples of the cult whose 
coat-tails are Immune to the kicks of enraged states- 
men and authors. It Is true, nevertheless, that mere 
"autographs by request" are of little value In the 
eyes of a wise collector. Even when they have the 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 3 5 

spice of hearty resentment they are by no means 
precious. 

In a curiously unappreciative paper concerning the 
beloved Autocrat, Oliver Wendell Holmes, included 
in "Adventures Among Books," Andrew Lang says 
of the delectable Doctor: "He was even too good- 
humored, and the worst thing I have ever heard of him 
is that he could not say 'no' to an autograph hunter." 
Surely Lang intended this accusation to be a gentle 
commendation, but I fear the casual reader will fail 
to detect the subtle humor of it. Treating it seri- 
ously, for the casual reader's sake, I own that I am 
unable to find in the amiable weakness any good rea- 
son for criticism or for censure. I admit that if these 
pests of great men had made demands upon the Doc- 
tor's purse they would have been seeking only trash, 
according to the dictum of the author of "Othello" — 
whoever that author may have been — and that by ask- 
ing for his autograph they were endeavoring to take 
from him his good name, but only as inscribed upon 
a sheet of paper and by no means making him "poor 
indeed." I am convinced that the sneers and cavils of 
those who pronounce harsh judgments upon the seek- 
ers of autographs are only the manifestations of ig- 
norant illiberality like the old complaints which are 
uttered from time to time about uncut books, deckel 
edges, first editions, and dainty bindings. These de- 
nunciations resemble the outcries of those who pos- 
sess not the fragrant automobile against the plutocrat 
who monopolizes our highways. When we are not 
of his class, we scold him bitterly, but if we come to 
that state of affluence which enables us to join his 
ranks, we quickly assume his autocratic demeanor to- 
wards those who merely cumber the earth with their 



36 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

slow-moving vehicles, horse-drawn, crawling along 
without benefit of gasoline or electricity. Probably 
the Merovingian kings with their ox-chariots were 
fiercely hostile to the swift pacer or trotter. "It all 
depends," as they say in the Mikado. It may be in- 
ferred that I do not love the motor-car. If I need 
rapidity of motion, I prefer to travel in the cab of an 
engine on the Twentieth Century Limited. I do not 
dote upon polo or bridge, but I keep silent about them 
because I know that my neighbor's tastes may be law- 
fully indulged whatever I may think about them or 
whether or not they accord with mine. As the pleas- 
ant writer of The Upton Letters remarks, "It does 
not matter how much people disagree, if they will only 
admit in their minds that every one has a right to a 
point of view, and that their own does not necessarily 
rule out all others." I am disposed to love my neigh- 
bors as myself, as good people are instructed to do, 
but the task is often arduous. I ask only that he will 
patiently indulge me in my fondness for my favorite 
books and my pet autographs, which cannot possibly 
interfere with his personal comfort as his automobile 
does with mine. 

Almost everyone who reads and who really thinks, 
has a pleasure in looking at autographs. In the great 
library of the Vatican I have observed the eager in- 
terest with which the visitors gaze upon the hand- 
writing of Henry VIII, of Anne Boleyn, and of Mar- 
tin Luther, — oddly preserved in a place where one 
would scarcely expect to find it. The throngs who con- 
template the wonderful collections In the British 
Museum testify to the fascination which clings to the 
actual pen-tracings made by men and women of his- 
toric fame, and the multitudes who visit the Library 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 37 

of Congress in Washington linger over the glass- 
covered cabinets where the letters of our Presidents, 
as well as of many other noted public men, grouped 
with their portraits, are admirably arranged for in- 
spection by the curious. 

The interest of many examples in collections is 
purely autographic — that is to say, the simple fact 
that the lines were inscribed by the particular person 
is the chief stimulant of the imagination. It may be 
merely a formal document to which only the signa- 
ture of Queen Elizabeth, or of Napoleon, or of 
Charles I. of England, or of Washington is affixed; it 
may be nothing but a line or two penned by Samuel 
Johnson, or by Dean Swift, by William Pitt or by 
Mazarin or Richelieu, — the effect is produced, and no 
one who has a spark of fancy can fail to gain some 
pleasure from the contemplation, for example, of an 
official paper bearing the names of Charles II. and 
Samuel Pepys, or a parchment scroll subscribed by 
Oliver Cromwell. It is a simple matter to advance 
from this point to the delight of reading original let- 
ters and manuscripts of intrinsic merit, and with the 
charm of reading comes the joy of possession. It is 
a joy whose nature is absolutely different from that 
which a bibliophile experiences when he gloats over 
his precious "first edition," or hugs to his bosom his 
invaluable Caxton. Sometimes there may be a sense 
of pride in the ownership of a thing which no one else 
may own, and we may detect the note of triumph 
sounded in the boast occasionally uttered by even the 
most modest of my brethren— "No specimen, sir, in 
the British Museum." But the real delight is in the 
feeling of companionship with the man who wrote 
the letter or the book. The true autograph hunter 



38 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

may live with Lamb, talk with Macaulay, listen to 
Dr. Johnson, gaze upon Thackeray at the Garrick, 
and stand in the presence of Pope and Dryden. If 
these are the results of devotion to "musty, dusty 
stuff," then let my amiable lunatic of Madison, Wis- 
consin, in the immortal words of Patrick Henry, 
"make the most of it." 

It is strange that the autograph collector is scorned 
and condemned by the majority. Perhaps it is because 
most men do not reflect about that which is of no im- 
mediate interest to them. It may be that it arises from 
the resentment which many are apt to feel towards 
the few who are devoted to some rather exclusive pur- 
suit: for the concrete autograph itself usually arouses 
some attention among intelligent persons. I have an 
idea that the depreciation comes from a certain affec- 
tation on the part of great men, and the shallow ac- 
quiescence of the careless newspaper scribblers in what 
they deem to be the popular judgment. Like the early 
Christians, we survive our persecutions. We know that 
popularity is a poor test of merit. It would be a sad 
day if collecting should ever become popular, as golf- 
ing is and as "bicycling" was. I have a keen sympathy 
for the English schoolmaster who said that golf and 
drink were the two curses of the country. 

But whatever may be the cause, it is undeniably true 
that plain persons, and even some who consider them- 
selves far superior to plain persons, are filled with un- 
holy glee whenever they find an opportunity to utter 
expressions of contempt and derision concerning the pur- 
suit of the autograph. These expressions are in most 
cases coupled with sarcastic allusions to postage stamps, 
and ev^ry man appears to believe that the Idea of asso- 
ciating a stamp collector and an autograph collector is 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 39 

entirely original with him. I have amused myself from 
time to time by recounting some of these censorious ob- 
servations and in trying to fathom the mystery of their 
genesis, while venturing mildly to demonstrate their in- 
justice. I confess that one of the latest examples which 
has been brought to my attention has given me more 
pain and surprise than any of its predecessors. We have 
been assailed and vilified in the house of our friends, 
and if one may be permitted to use a trite expression, 
attributed to a personage whose autograph would adorn 
even the British Museum, one may well cry out,^^jE^ tu 
Bruter 

No collector deserving the name is unaware of the 
proud eminence which has always been awarded to the 
Reverend William Buel Sprague, D. D., the grand- 
father of us all, who from his Albanian eyrie dis- 
pensed autograph letters throughout the land, and with 
delightful liberality shared his stores with his brethren 
of the cult, while reserving for his own a splendid mass 
of rare Americana. The enthusiastic Draper says of 
him that he ''fills a distinguished and unique place in the 
history of American literature and is accorded on all 
hands the highest rank among the early American au- 
tograph collectors." Was he not the man who furnished 
to Doctor Emmet that peerless Lynch letter, the envy 
of all collectors? I have heard rumors of another let- 
ter, said to belong to Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, but I 
have my doubts. From the description of it given to 
me, I think it must be the one which is printed in Dra- 
per's "Autographic Collections" and is shown to be a 
forgery. I had acquired a reverence for the worthy 
Doctor equal to that with which the devotee of Chris- 
tian Science regards Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, or to that 
which we are assured on unimpeachable authority, the 



40 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

heathen exhibits when he bows down to wood and stone. 
But a kind Bostonian, actuated by generous impulse, 
although perhaps not wholly lacking in sarcastic humor, 
once gave me a book called "Visits to European Celeb- 
rities, by William B. Sprague, D. D.," from the library 
of Governor Charles H. Bell, of New Hampshire, 
which contains an original autograph letter of the ex- 
cellent dominie, written undoubtedly to Bell himself. 
The astonishing tenor of this letter leads me to pre- 
sent it in all its hideousness : 

"Albany, i8 April, '68. 
"My dear sir: Your kind letter has set me to 
looking through a part of my collection to see if I 
could find duplicates of any of your names on your 
list, and the result, as you will see, is a very meagre 
contribution. Such as they are, however, you are en- 
tirely welcome to them. As a friend, I would advise 
you to have as little to do with an autograph collector 
as possible, for though there are some honorable ex- 
ceptions, yet, as a class, I think they rank A No. i 
in point of meanness. 

"Very truly yours, 

W. B. Sprague." 

I acknowledge that on the first perusal of this re- 
markable epistle I was stricken with the sort of stupor 
which used to overcome the Virgilian hero when he 
succumbed to circumstances and '^vox faucihus haesitJ* 
After having battled with all the indictments found by 
the grand jury of the public, the charges of covetous- 
ness, selfishness, impudence, silliness, uselessness, born 
of the plenitude of popular misinformation, and after 
what I had vainly deemed my triumphant pleas to those 
indictments, sustained, as I fondly imagined, by the 
courts of highest jurisdiction — to be confronted now 
with an accusation based upon the shameless confession 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 41 

of a co-conspirator, the shocking admissions of a parti- 
ceps criminis, the State's evidence of a faithless asso- 
ciate, made my heart fail me for a moment, and my soul 
to grow sad as I said, "but it was even thou, my com- 
panion, my guide, and mine own familiar friend !" Figu- 
ratively, Doctor Sprague was all of that to me, although 
I must own that his birth antedates mine a little over half 
a century, and I never had the good fortune to enjoy 
his actual personal acquaintance. It would not have as- 
tonished me more had Doctor Emmet denounced the 
Signers, Gratz or Greenough sneered at Continental 
Congressmen, or Benjamin proclaimed the folly of buy- 
ing autographs in the market. If Mr. Hearst had nomi- 
nated Mayor Gaynor for the Presidency, or if the New 
York Tribune had blazed out in condemnation of pro- 
tective tariffs, they would not have given me as serious 
a shock as did this utterance of the venerable Sprague. 
But there lies the record, and with an effort I summon 
what remains of my intellect in order to apply myself to 
a calm consideration of this unexpected situation. 

We are at a disadvantage at the outset, because the 
evidence upon which the charge is based has not been 
submitted to our scrutiny. A good deal of the merit of 
a cause depends upon the nature of the proof presented 
in its support. It is not difficult to formulate a com- 
plaint, but it is sometimes hard to bring the witnesses 
up to the necessities of the case. I once had a client 
who would come to the office just before the trial 
of his action and, rubbing his hands in a genial way, cry 
out, "Well, what do you want us to swear to?" But 
he was an exception, for they generally exhibit a strong 
disinclination to testify to the point and make strenuous 
efforts to evade it. It would have been a pleasure to 
question the frank and honest Doctor, but unfortunately 



42 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

he Is beyond the reach of cross-examination. What 
tales he might have unfolded! Alas, they are buried 
with him. We may only analyze the accusation and 
endeavor to determine its justice or its injustice by 
methods which are not permitted by the rules of evi- 
dence. 

Meanness means the mean. The mean is the low- 
minded, base, wanting in integrity, poor, pitiful, stingy. 
Meanness is a low state, poorness, want of dignity or 
excellence, want of liberality. I must be right about 
this, for I am quoting from a standard dictionary. On 
behalf of the fraternity of autograph collectors, and 
withgut a fee — unprofessional as it may seem — I enter 
a plea of "not guilty." When Doctor Sprague penned 
those fatal lines, he was suffering no doubt from some 
experience of a painful nature with a pseudo-collector, 
a mere Jeremy Diddler of a collector, who being aware 
of his sweet simplicity of character and willingness to 
help the aspiring neophyte, had attempted to impose 
upon him for purposes of sordid gain. 

One great difficulty which a reasonable man en- 
counters in the course of his life — and I consider myself 
the only truly reasonable man of my acquaintance — is 
the unfortunate tendency of other men to indulge in 
generalizations. Almost all generalizations are dan- 
gerous, fallacious, and fraught with violations of the 
rules of logic. Journeying in Canada some years ago 
in the society of an eminent author of our day, we met 
a lad who suffered from, a bad cough, and some hours 
later we came upon another boy who was laboring un- 
der a similar affliction. My literary friend thereupon 
delivered himself of this solemn judgment: "All small 
boys in Canada have coughs." We are familiar with 
the story of the Englishman visiting Germany for the 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 43 

first time, and after a single hour's experience in a rail- 
way carriage, noting in his diary: "All Germans have 
red hair and are named Muller." The Psalmist said 
in his haste that all men are liars. I can not help think- 
ing that Doctor Sprague said what he did about col- 
lectors in like haste and with less justification, because 
all men, except George Washington and Mark Twain, 
have lied at times, whereas I am confident that col- 
lectors, as a rule, are not mean and that the mean ones 
are the dishonorable exceptions. But although I hold 
a brief for the defence, I intend to be fair. I am in- 
formed that no less a person than Doctor Thomas Ad- 
dis Emmet himself — clarum et verier ahile nomen — as- 
serts that Sprague was well within the truth when he 
stigmatized collectors in the manner set forth in the 
Bell letter; that he was victimized right and left by peo- 
ple who never compensated him for material that he sold 
to them ; and that he declared that Emmet and the late 
T. Bailey Myers were the only customers who paid him. 

It must be remembered, however, that Doctor 
Sprague was not a dealer, a business man, with a 
tangible shop and a real, perceptible price-list. Per- 
haps the recipients of his autographic contributions 
thought that they were donees and not vendees. Dif- 
fident persons, strangers, might well hesitate about 
offering filthy lucre to a learned Doctor of Divinity, 
unless he does as merchants do and gives notice that 
he is in trade, by judicious advertisement. I doubt 
whether he mentioned prices or sent a bill, but if he 
expected payment he should have resorted to the or- 
dinary methods of business. 

Assuming that Doctor Sprague has testified that 
Emmet and Myers were the only persons who consti- 
tute the "honorable exceptions" referred to in the 



44 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Bell letter, let us subject the complainant to such cross- 
examination as under our severe difficulties, we may 
resort to in aid of our clients. Doctor, did you ever 
know one Israel W. Tefft, of Georgia? Is it not a 
fact that when you visited him in 1830 he had only 
about thirty letters of Signers, but that he offered to 
give you such as you needed — and you took them? 
Did he not in 1845 present to you one or more Lynch 
signatures to enable you to complete your additional 
sets? If the Doctor's devoted admirer, Lyman C. 
Draper, is telling the truth, the answers must be "yes." 
Now, I show you a letter in your unmistakable chi- 
rography, dated at Flushing, October 16, 1874, and 
call your attention to this language: "When I began 
to collect autographs, I was the intimate friend and 
correspondent of Robert Gilmour of your city, the 
first collector I ever knew, but it is long since his col- 
lection was sold and I suppose scattered to the 
winds." I will ask you now whether you were not 
mistaken in your statement to Doctor Emmet, and if 
the names of Tefft and of Gilmour — your "intimate 
friend" — should not be excluded from the category 
of "mean collectors," thus doubling the number of 
your "honorable exceptions?" 

I think I will not call any witnesses, because I have 
none excepting myself. Truly, my own experience 
has led me to a conclusion quite different from that 
which the dear old Doctor announced so dogmatically. 
That experience, I admit, has not been extensive, but 
there has been a great change in autograph hunting 
since the Doctor's day and generation. Autograph 
collecting in this country was then in its infancy; the 
collecting of to-day bears a similar relation to that of 
fifty years ago which the telephone bears to the post 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 45 

or the Chicago Flyer to the deliberate trains of the 
old Camden and Amboy. It has been my good for- 
tune to find the genuine collectors fair-minded, gen- 
erous, and sympathetic, and I have often profited by 
their generosity. I hesitate to "name names" but per- 
haps I may be pardoned for mentioning the late El- 
liot Danforth, and also the scholarly Boston lawyer, 
Charles P. Greenough. Laurence Hutton too, was 
liberal and I am grateful to him, although I do not 
accept his peculiar views about autographs. As there 
is a "science falsely so called," there are collectors 
who do not deserve the honorable name ; and I am 
sure that if I could summon the shade of Sprague to 
this mortal sphere he would readily admit that his 
incautious assertion was the result of some temporary 
obscuration of the mind and that he did not really 
mean it. 

Returning to the subject of the joys of the collector, 
we cannot forget that no less famous a man than Na- 
thaniel Hawthorne has recorded his views. When 
he had before him a book containing letters of states- 
men and soldiers of the Revolution, he put himself in 
the noble order of autograph lovers. I cite his very 
words, because, much to my astonishment, I find that 
he expresses my own feelings much more eloquently 
than I am able to do. "They are profitable reading 
on a quiet afternoon," he said, "and in a mode with- 
drawn from too intimate relation with the present 
time, so that we can glide backward some three-quart- 
ers of a century, and surround ourselves with the 
ominous sublimity of circumstances that then frowned 
upon the writers. * * * They are magic scrolls, 
if read in the right spirit. The roll of the drum and 
the fanfare of the trumpet is latent in some of them; 



46 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

and in others, an echo of the oratory that resounded 
in the old halls of the Continental Congress, at Phila- 
delphia ; or the words may come to us as with the liv- 
ing utterance of one of those illustrious men, speak- 
ing face to face, in friendly communion. Strange, that 
the mere identity of paper and ink should be so pow- 
erful. The same thoughts might look cold and in- 
effectual in a printed book. Human nature craves a 
certain materialism, and clings pertinaciously to what 
is tangible, as if that were of more importance than 
the spirit accidentally involved in it. And, in truth, 
the original manuscript has always something which 
print itself must inevitably lose. An erasure, even a 
blot, a casual irregularity of hand, and all such little 
imperfections of mechanical executions, bring us close 
to the writer, and perhaps convey some of those sub- 
tle intimations for which language has no shape. 
* * * * There are said to be temperaments en- 
dowed with sympathies so exquisite that, by merely 
handling an autograph, they can detect the writer's 
character with unerring accuracy, and read his in- 
most heart as easily as a less gifted eye would peruse 
the written page. Our faith in this power, be it a 
spiritual one, or only a refinement of the physical na- 
ture, is not unlimited, in spite of evidence. 
God has imparted to the human soul a marvellous 
strength in guarding its secrets, and he keeps at least 
the deepest and most inward record for his own 
perusal. But if there be such sympathies as we have 
alluded to, in how many instances would history be 
put to blush by a volume of autographic letters, like 
this which we now close!"* 



*A Book of Autographs: Hawthorne's Works. Ed. 1889. 
Vol. XII, 88. 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 47 

Even In a sedate student of history, a new emotion^ 
may be produced by the actual and visible presence 
of such a letter as this, from Charles II. which speaks^ 
of a kindly heart, whatever we may think of the 
morals of the Merry Monarch. As Mr. Choate said 
some years ago, "he was a jovial blade." 

''Whitehall, lo Jan., 1684. 
Harry Sidney. I would have you assure Temple 
that I am very kinde to him, and if he can compasse 
the match he designes at Paris I will use my best 
offices with the king of France to make It In all points 
as easy to him as I can. 

Charles R." 

I trust that no disrespect Is Implied in spelling the 
word "king" with a small "K." 

Coming to a much later day, it Is surely of interest 
to read what George Bancroft thought of President 
Andrew Johnson, particularly in view of the discovery, 
from the Johnson papers in the Congressional Library, 
that the first message of that much-abused president, a 
state paper admired and wondered at when it ap- 
peared, was drafted by America's most distinguished 
historian. He is writing to Adam Badeau. "I knew 
Andrew Johnson thoroughly well," he says, "having 
once lived near him where I saw him every day and 
had the most unreserved intercourse with him. I then 
held and now hold that his arraignment was an act of 
injustice, and that he was on his trial thoroughly en- 
titled to acquittal. The man had faults enough, ambi- 
tion enough; but his unvaried Intention was, to main- 
tain fidelity to the Constitution and keep within Its 
bounds." If we look upon Bancroft on that side of his 
character which is the most attractive, we cannot fail 
to be brought closer to him when we have before us, 



48 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

in his own distinct handwriting, what he wrote to Bay- 
ard Taylor in 1864. "Mr. Lang has just left with me 
your chant for Bryant's 70th birthday. It is admirable. 
I expected good from you; and you have done exceed- 
ingly well. You need never regret that you made this 
most successful effort. . . . You are too modest. 
Your parts are never of the past." I am sorry to say 
that Bancroft then proceeds to suggest amendments of 
Taylor's verses, which in charity I refuse to quote. They 
partake of the quality exhibited in the Poems of 1823. 
The "Mr. Lang" mentioned in the letter is not Andrew 
the All-Knowing, but Louis Lang, an artist of 
New York, who composed the music for Tay- 
lor's Ode, which was sung at the Century Club 
on the night of November 5th, 1864, when — 
Bancroft presiding and Emerson, Holmes and a 
host of others assembled — that Association commem- 
orated the arrival of the beloved poet at the age of 
three score and ten. 

The innate modesty of Hawthorne shines out in this 
brief letter, which he wrote from Lenox in December, 
1850, after he had given to the world "The Scarlet 
Letter," and had ceased to be what he once styled him- 
self, "the obscurest man of letters in America." I do 
not know the name of the person to whom it was writ- 
ten: but that is of no moment. He writes: "I am 
gratified that you think me worth biographizing; and 
as soon as I get a book off my hands, I will see what 
I can do towards your purpose. You will not find it 
a life of many incidents. I could wish (not for the 
first time) that I were personally known to you, and 
could impart the requisite materials from one corner 
of the fireside to the other." That this expression was 
sincere, there can be no question; it does not bear out 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 49 

the idea that Hawthorne was an unsocial person, shun- 
ning his fellow-beings. But I must not indulge too free- 
ly in my fondness for my own treasures. 

Sometimes the satisfaction in the possession of "some- 
thing which no one else may own," is seriously les- 
sened by the discovery that some one else has a prize 
which he fondly believes to be the very thing which 
I cherish so lovingly. I have had at least three severe 
shocks but I have survived them. My letter of Oliver 
Wendell Holmes to Parsons, the translator of the "In- 
ferno," dated in 1867, was printed in the "Century" 
for October, 1901, in an article by Maria S. Porter, 
with a few verbal changes of no moment but dated 
"1869," and the writer asserted that she was "the for- 
tunate possessor of it." In my anxiety, I wrote to her 
at the address given to me by the publishers of the mag- 
azine, and told her courteously of my predicament. I 
received no reply, and as my letter was not returned 
to me I infer that possibly the lady had once owned 
the Holmes letter but had parted with it before her 
article appeared. Years ago I purchased what was 
called the manuscript of Moore's "Epicurean," cover- 
ing one hundred and forty-seven pages of the two hun- 
dred and eleven comprised in the edition of 1839. 
Within a short time I saw in the catalogue of the sale 
of Le Gallienne's autographs, an announcement of 
"The Manuscript of Thomas Moore's Epicurean." 
Later it was sold in Bishop Hurst's collection, and the 
purchaser kindly allowed me to examine it. His man- 
uscript is perhaps the "original manuscript of the orig- 
inal draft;" contained in a blank book; a preliminary 
sketch, and valuable enough, while mine is manifestly 
the copy sent to the printer. 

I have what I am quite sure Is the manuscript of 



so EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Barry Cornwall's "Life of Charles Lamb," a thick 
volume whose sheets seem, like my Moore's pages, to be 
those which the compositors handled. But when the 
aforesaid collection of the worthy Bishop was disposed 
of at auction, there was another "Manuscript of Barry 
Cornwall's Life of Charles Lamb" offered to a confiding 
public. I have seen this also, and while it is bound in 
a style quite similar to mine, it is much smaller and ap- 
pears to be only a rough draft of a portion of the book. 
The Bishop and I seem to have been enamored of 
drafts. These fables teach us not to be unduly puffed 
up about our "author's manuscripts;" there may be 
several of the same work, for worthy books are not 
thrown off at a single sitting. 

An English dealer once pointed out to me, by way 
of temptation to a patriotic American, the alleged man- 
uscript of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," and was quite 
depressed in spirit when I told him that good old Doc- 
tor Smith spent a large part of his declining years in 
producing autograph copies of his one famous poem; 
and Holmes, in his generous way, did not disdain to 
turn out copies of "Old Ironsides" and "The Last 
Leaf" — precious things, even if not the originals. 

The number of genuine collectors in the United States 
is not large, but it is increasing. To those of us whose 
appetite has not yet been satiated, it is discouraging to 
observe the rise in the prices of desirable autographs. 
The Athenaeum article from which I have already 
quoted, refers to contemporaneous auction values, and 
speaks of Cromwell at five guineas, Francis L at four 
shillings. Sir Francis Walsingham with five added signa- 
tures at nine shillings. Lord Nelson at two pounds fifteen 
shillings, and Gibbon at eight shillings. Before me is a 
manuscript catalogue of a leading London house in 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 5 1 

which Cromwell figures at eighteen pounds twelve shill- 
ings, Francis I. at ten pounds, Walsingham at thirty-five 
pounds, and Gibbon at two pounds fifteen shillings. At 
a sale in London in May, 1904, a letter of Nelson to 
Lady Hamilton brought one thousand and thirty pounds 
t — it seems an absurd price. The "Evening Post" 
bibliophile intimates that it is likely that "two agents 
at the sale had unlimited bids from long-pursed buy- 
ers, and each determined to outbid the other, and both 
lost their heads." I am pleased to find one of my theor- 
ies about these tremendous prices sustained by such a 
competent authority. There are other reasons for the 
differences in sale values. The importance of the con- 
tents of letter or document, the sudden increase in the 
fame of the writer, and the anxiety of some enthusiast 
to obtain the one specimen needed to complete a 
"set," are all factors. Twenty years ago the eigh- 
teen lines which now confront me in the rather boy- 
ish scrawl of Theodore Roosevelt might have been 
found in the "seventy-five cent list," but it cost me ten 
dollars — a fact which illustrates the truth of the adage 
concerning the unwise person and his supply of coin, 
more forcible than polite. It suggests the idea that the 
problem of what to do with our ex-Presidents is more 
easily solved than we had supposed. Ten autograph 
letters a day at ten dollars each would afford a respect- 
able income, although there would be danger of over- 
stocking the market; but Congress might establish a 
fixed price, deriving its power in that regard from the 
interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. 

Bearing in mind the record contained in the Athen- 
aeum, it is not unlikely that the man who bought wisely 
in 1828 might have left a legacy to his descendants far 
more valuable than city lots in upper New York which 



52 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

have enriched so many members of our modern 
aristocracy. Regarded as an investment, I am in- 
chned to believe that a well-selected collection of 
autograph letters may be, in the long run, superior to 
railway stocks or bonds. It is true that autographs pay 
no dividends; but we know that, and we never know 
whether we are to get our income from what we are 
pleased to call our "securities." There is great satis- 
faction in being certain about something. I know that 
there has been offered to me for a dozen Revolutionary 
War letters, signed by Washington, double the amount 
I paid for them a few years ago, and I cannot say as 
much for any of the beautifully engraved certificates or 
evidences of indebtedness of "railways" or "industri- 
als." I suppose the name "industrials" was adopted 
because of the energy with which the promoters 
"worked" the community. The real collector, however, 
has small regard for the sordid side of the occupation. 
I would not part with my Washingtons for many times 
their cost, but I like to think that somebody covets them. 
When the Maniac charges me with turning up my 
nose at his kind, he is mistaken. I am not what Mrs. 
Squeers called "a turned-up-nose peacock," — far from 
it. Dickens remarked that a peacock with a turned-up- 
nose is a novelty in ornithology and a thing not com- 
monly seen. A collector of autographs who turns up 
his nose at any other collector is just as much of a nov- 
elty. The collector who deserves the name is compre- 
hensive in his affections; nothing collectorial is alien 
to him. He would indeed be an offensive creature who 
would scorn the feeblest efforts of an aspirant, the in- 
cipient struggles of a neophyte whose untutored mind is 
striving to attain the ultimate goal of ambition. I re- 
member that in my salad days I deliberately destroyed 



THE QUEST OF THE AUTOGRAPH 53 

a large number of interesting letters of public men in or- 
der to save only the signatures, and yet I escaped an 
indictment for malicious mischief. We must all have 
our beginnings; we must pass through the trying or- 
deals of infancy, of boyhood, and of young manhood. 
There are many stages of the malady which Edmund 
Gosse calls "collectaneomania." 

A veteran collector would no more dream of distort- 
ing his nasal organ in the presence of youthful ignor- 
ance than Grant or Lee would have thought of sneering 
at a West Point cadet or Choate or Carter would have 
despised a Bachelor of Laws just out of Cambridge, 
Columbia, or Mr. Chase's School. It is delightful to 
observe the protoplasmic germ of a collector; no one 
can tell what may come of it; it may develop into 
greatness. The serene altitude of the Bixbys and the 
Morgans I do not hope to attain; but despite the ill- 
concealed amusement of the populace, I expect to con- 
tinue to the end of life the pleasant quest of the auto- 
graph. 



REFLECTIONS OF AN AUTOGRAPH LOVER 

UPON the principle of dichotomous division, 
dear to the soul of my old preceptor Dr. 
Atwater, mankind may be said to consist 
of two classes — those who collect auto- 
graphs and those who do not. I am ad- 
dressing myself to the second and numerically larger 
class, for to the others I can impart little or nothing 
of interest or value. They know it all themselves. 

A well-beloved friend, known in the world of litera- 
ture — the late Laurence Hutton— said in a lecture at 
Princeton that there were four methods of getting au- 
tographs: that is to say, by reception, by gift, by pur- 
chase, and by theft. I do not reproduce his exact words 
but only my recollection of them as he repeated them 
to me while we were enjoying a sociable cigar on the 
pleasant piazza of "The Inn." He did not refer to a 
fifth method, adopted only by fiends, which may be 
styled "extortion," possibly because he regarded it as 
only a species of the genus theft. It is the devotee of 
extortion who makes the honorable guild of autograph 
collectors unjustly odious in the sight of the world. He 
surely overlooked other ways and means which may be 
mentioned hereafter. 

I have endeavored elsewhere in a mild and humble 
manner to vindicate the lover of autographs, truly so- 
called, but I fear that my well-meant effort has not been 
overwhelmingly successful. An acquaintance who made 
false pretense of having read the dissertation, said smil- 
ingly to me: "Why, I used to collect postage stamps 

55 



S6 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

myself, when I was a boy", unthinkingly classing my 
pursuit with the feeble strivings of his childhood. But 
it is not my purpose to make a brief in the case of the 
autograph hunter against the scoffer. He who does not 
comprehend intuitively the good there is in the collect- 
ing of autographs will never be convinced by all the 
logic of the schools. It must come to him like an ap- 
preciation of Tintoretto. 

In many instances the utterances of those who abuse 
collectors are the result of pure ignorance. At a sale 
a few years ago, a number of letters were disposed of 
by auction, including some of Henry Clay and other 
American public men, which realized only small sums, 
and one of the late Edward VII. written when he was 
Prince of Wales and addressed to Mrs. Langtry, for 
which some misguided but enthusiastic individual paid 
ninety dollars as I have elsewhere related. Of course 
the low prices of the great Americans were occasioned 
by the profusion of the supply — the statesmen of 
Clay's time must have written letters by the mile. 
Say what the newspaper critics will, there are vast 
numbers of people of refinement who gaze with in- 
terest and curiosity on a letter from a King to a famous 
actress, but who cast an indifferent eye upon long 
and eloquent epistles of Clay or of Webster. To 
denounce all collectors as snobs because one of them 
paid ninety dollars for King Edward's autograph, is 
an excellent example of our old college acquaintance, the 
fallacy of the undistributed middle. We might as well 
say that because some of our metropolitan journals reek 
with sensation, foulness and crime, all newspapers are 
dirty and disreputable. 

We will assume as a postulate that it must be of 
benefit to gather into one's possession the veritable 



AN AUTOGRAPH LOVER 57 

writings of the famous, the things which their own 
hands made, and we will consider briefly the way of 
the man with the autograph. A notable thing it is, 
indeed, to receive from a person of distinction an au- 
tograph letter addressed to one's self, voluntarily, 
without previous solicitation — like the one I am so 
proud of, from that noble statesman, Grover Cleve- 
land, which I prize far beyond all the rest. Obviously 
it must be only the favored few who are able to point 
exultingly to letters of that order; men like James T. 
Fields, Charles Oilier, the publisher, or dear Lau- 
rence Hutton of blessed memory. I remember that 
the Landmarker refused to admit any other sort with- 
in the attractive boundaries of his collection. It is 
not pleasant to think that at some day such treasures 
must either be added to the number of marketable au- 
tographs or be buried irretrievably in some splendid 
library where nobody will pay much attention to them. 
The surest way of consigning to oblivion a collection 
of autographs is to bestow it upon a public library 
over whose glass-covered cases may well be inscribed 
lasciate ogni speranza. Perhaps the Library of Con- 
gress may be an exception. A few framed specimens 
like the fine George Washington, on the walls of the 
Bodleian, which stirred with pride my American 
heart, are suitable enough, but an autograph collection 
is not to be stored away in locked cabinets or in steel- 
bound vaults. It is something to be played with, to 
be pawed over, to be arranged and re-arranged, per- 
petually to be added to, enlarged, revised, and im- 
proved. It should be free from the intrusion of paste 
and of albums. It should be protected by wrappers 
or by portfolios only, except perhaps in the case of 
complete "sets", such as "Signers of the Declara- 



58 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

tion", "Presidents", "Kings of England", "Napo- 
leon's Marshals", or "Generals of the Revolution", 
and these, when completed and associated with the 
best of portraits, may be enshrined by our pet binder 
in the richest of crushed levant, or in the more dura- 
ble pig-skin which that dean of collectors. Dr. Em- 
met, is said to prefer over all other kinds of binding. 

It is also a delightful thing to acquire the auto- 
graphs by gift, and the soul of the collector expands 
with emotion when he contemplates the charming 
specimens bestowed upon him by bountiful friends. I 
cannot forget my own joy over the rare letter of Rich- 
ter sent to me by a brother lawyer, or the manuscript 
notes of a speech of Daniel Webster, which came 
from a kindly Boston book-lover, or the Rufus Choate 
manuscript, a portentous array of wild scrawlings, 
the gift of another New York lawyer endowed with a 
genuine affection for that which is good and instruc- 
tive; or that splendid Kipling story, "The Recrudes- 
cence of Imray", as it was originally called, which the 
famous bank-president brought to me with his own 
hands, leaving me breathless with gratitude and 
amazement. My ponderous portfolios of Continental 
Congressmen would be sadly deficient but for the gen- 
erosity of Danforth and Greenough. It speaks in no 
uncertain accents of the altruism of collectors, this 
fondness for helping others. I do not discover it in 
any other class of collectors. How much dear old 
Dr. Sprague did to enlarge the happiness of his 
brethren ! 

George William Curtis, that true literary artist, 
must have been one of the few who realize that it is 
more blessed to give than to receive, when he parted 
with that notelet which I have bound in my set of the 



AN AUTOGRAPH LOVER 59 

original numbers of The Virginians together with a 
page of the manuscript of that novel; it is quoted in 
James Grant Wilson's book: 

"My dear Curtis: 

Who can be the friend who asks for the signature 
of the unhappy 

W. M. Thackeray?" 

I do not know who the friend was, but he deserved 
summary and condign punishment because he asked 
for a signature only. He who begs for a signature is 
lost. He has not attained the lowest round of the 
ladder; he has the same relation to the kingdom of 
collection as the patent medicine advertisement has to 
literature or which the lad with his hoard of postage 
stamps has to Beverly Chew or to Howard Mansfield. 
I shall never feel that I have done my duty as a citi- 
zen until I shall have secured the adoption of an 
amendment to the Constitution making the solicitation 
of an autograph signature equivalent to an overt act 
of treason. 

Not many of us are fortunate enough to have the 
help of such assistants as the Autocrat of the Break- 
fast Table whose masterpiece, according to Donald 
Mitchell, will go with Montaigne, with the essays of 
Goldsmith, and with "Elia" upon one of the low 
shelves where it may be easily reached and where it 
will always be ready to give joy to the reader. The 
sweet doctor writes, in his clear, dainty hand: 

"Beverly Farms, Mass., August 21, 1879. 
My dear Longfellow: I send you a letter of Mr. 
Frederick Locker with a request which I know you 
will comply with. The daughter he refers to, as you 
may remember, married Tennyson's son. If you 
would have the kindness, after writing the lines 



6o EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

marked for yourself, to send the whole, letter and all, 
to Emerson, he to Whittier, and Whittier to me, I 
should feel in sending back the manuscript that I had 
made Mr. Locker happy, and that I should be glad to 
do, for he has shown me much kindness, though I 
have never seen him. I cannot help the fact that his 
letter has a few complimentary words about myself 
— you can skip those, if you will read the rest. 
Always faithfully yours, 

O. W. Holmes." 

I am told by those who knew him that Frederick 
Locker (later calling himself, for financial reasons, 
Frederick Locker-Lampson) who WTOte the London 
Lyrics, was personally unpleasant, disagreeable, and 
repellent. But if any man who loves books or the 
makers of books pauses to ponder over the kindly 
epistle of the beloved Holmes, his imagination must 
surely be stimulated when he reflects that it was writ- 
ten by the witty poet and essayist, who is one of our 
dearest possessions; that it passed through the hands 
of a greater poet who was almost as lovable, to whom 
it was addressed; and that it reminds us of an accom- 
plished author, who may have been ungracious and 
uncomfortable to meet, but who wrote charmingly 
and whose interesting Confidences recall pleasantly 
the literary life of London in his day. It recalls also 
the daughter-in-law of the great Laureate, and the 
wonderful New Englanders, Emerson and Whittier, 
who certainly did not refuse to comply with a request 
so gently made. 

Not unlike the Autocrat's letter is this one to Cur- 
tis, which I find among my belongings : 

"Sunnyside, September 12, 1854. 
Mr. dear Mr. Curtis : I hasten to furnish the auto- 
graphs you request for those two 'enthusiastic, lovely 



AN AUTOGRAPH LOVER 6i 

and sensible' young ladles of whom you speak. Dur- 
ing the prevalence of the autograph mania, it is quite 
a relief to have such fair and interesting applicants. 
Yours very truly, 

Washington Irving. 
George W. Curtis, Esq." 

It is comical to observe the old bachelor's willing- 
ness to oblige pretty girls, as if their requests for au- 
tographs were less tiresome than those of mere men. 
Irving was always fond of the society of women, true 
as he was to the memory of the one whom he lost in 
her girlhood. 

Another means of obtaining autographs, which may 
be a sub-head under the title "gift", is exchange. There 
was more exchanging done in the earlier days than now. 
Perhaps the most famous instance on record is the one 
described in the books, where Doctor Sprague, the re- 
nowned pioneer in our ranks, parted with the only 
known letter of Thomas Lynch, Jr., written to Wash- 
ington on July 5, 1777. It went to Doctor Emmet in 
a barter, practically costing him $700, according to the 
testimony of Lyman C. Draper, who published a volume 
about the Signers of the Declaration and the Signers 
of the Constitution. Lynch the youthful Signer, who 
was lost at sea when only thirty years old, ranks with 
Button Gwinnett, of Georgia, as the rarest of the noble 
company. Gwinnett left no holograph letters, as far as 
my information goes, but there are several autograph 
documents of his which are almost as valuable as letters 
would be. Doctor Sprague had the good fortune to 
know Judge Bushrod Washington, and obtained his 
permission to select whatever he pleased from the 
voluminous correspondence of the General, leaving cop- 
ies of those he desired to take with him. He chose 



62 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

about fifteen hundred, among them the unrivaled Lynch^ 
the envy and despair of modern American collectors, 
who must needs be content with "cut" signatures. It is 
said that the fortunate owner once refused $5,000 for 
it, and it is now the property of the New York Public 
Library. 

Hutton, while mentioning four ways of gathering au- 
tographs, overlooked inheritance as well as extortion 
and exchange. The Leffingwell collection was be- 
queathed to a niece of the original collector; part of 
Sprague's went to his son, a respected lawyer in New 
York, who transferred it to the accomplished Albanian 
and entertaining speaker, the late John Boyd Thacher; 
T. Bailey Myers left his large accumulations to his son 
and daughter, from whom they passed to join the Em- 
met collection in the New York Library; and Mrs. 
Ely, of Providence, almost a unique example of a fem- 
inine autograph-collector, handed down her stores to her 
daughter and her grandson. I question whether an 
inherited collection ever appeals strongly to the lega- 
tees; the taste itself may be inherited but it does not 
pass by testamentary disposition. 

It is the fate of most collections to be dispersed, and 
in my copy of Draper's book I have inserted a letter of 
Doctor Sprague, in which he writes, characteristically: 
"If you happen to have any duplicates, and will tell me 
what they are, and which you want, I will see if I can 
accommodate you by an exchange. When I began to 
collect autographs I was the intimate friend and cor- 
respondent of Robert Gilmour, of your city, — the first 
collector I ever knew. But it is long since his collec- 
tion was sold and, I suppose, scattered to the winds." 
Gilmour (or Gilmor) was of Baltimore and some of 
his quondam possessions rest now in my own collec- 



AN AUTOGRAPH LOVER 63 

tion, to be dispersed again, I know, in the course of 
time. 

Most of us acquired our autographs as Major Gen- 
eral Stanley acquired his ancestors— by purchase ; from 
dealers, from private owners, and from sales at auction. 
It is said that auction sales of autographs began in Lon- 
don in the early part of the last century, and since 1823 
they have been quite frequent not only in England but 
in Paris, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. It is 
not at all a romantic or a picturesque way, and one 
cannot grow very gossipy or loquacious about such pure- 
ly mercantile transactions. As in the case of books, 
the auction prices seldom afford any just criterion of 
value. There may be an enthusiast, bent upon gaining 
certain items, who will run up the prices to fabulous 
heights, and again there may be occasions when, by 
reason of indifference, or of inadequate advertising, the 
finest specimens are knocked down for a trifling sum, 
but generally to professionals. I never got a bargain 
in my life; and if an amateur shows himself at such 
sales he is promptly frozen out or rather lifted out by 
a combination of the dealers. Usually it is better to 
treat with one of the regular tradesmen in autographs; 
the private vendor is commonly impossible. His idea 
of the value of what he has, is generally absurd. The 
dealer will ask more than his wares are really worth, but 
we must make due allowance, and as most of us are 
engaged in other pursuits demanding a fairly constant 
attention, we ought to pay him for the time he saves 
us as well as for his expert judgment, and the money 
is not thrown away. It is odd that some American 
autographs are very dear in England, and most Eng- 
lish autographs are correspondingly dear in New York. 
This is of little moment to the money-kings who have 



64 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

taken to autograph-collecting, and who think nothing of 
sweeping up a collection of thousands, while we humbler 
disciples are conscious of guilt if we timidly venture a 
few hundred dollars, after much pondering and self- 
castigation. Yet I believe that he who painfully brings 
together his beloved scraps piece-meal, by unaided toil 
and research, derives more pleasure from it than do 
those who purchase at wholesale. 

Even the least avaricious of us sometimes dream of 
finding money; and when I have been thinking of a 
certain piece of luck which befell a lady I once knew, 
I am sure to dream of finding a long-forgotten hoard 
of autographs in some out-of-the-way place. A long 
time ago this lady was sojourning at the home of a ven- 
erable member of the Franklin family, and on seeing 
some men carrying off a large box or barrel of old pa- 
pers, was moved to ask the owner to let her have the 
rejected rubbish. It turned out to be a wonderful au- 
tographic treasure — drafts of letters, essays, reports, 
Revolutionary accounts kept while the writer was in 
France, all in the hand of Benjamin Franklin; letters 
addressed to him, one from John Paul Jones describing 
the battle of the Bon Homme Richard, saved as by a 
miracle from the devouring maw of the paper mill. 
These now occupy a place of honor in the collection of 
a learned Pennsylvania Society, except the Jones letter 
which I am told was unluckily given away to some 
person unknown. It makes one's heart sink to be in- 
formed that there had been other barrels ! The increas- 
ed interest in all Revolutionary records which has come 
In later days makes it well nigh impossible that such a 
chance should come to anyone now. Yet the South has 
not been fully explored. 

As to theft and extortion, it is well not to go into 



AN AUTOGRAPH LOVER 6 s 

distressing details. I do not justify the larceny of an 
autograph letter for purposes of gain, but when I am 
permitted to browse peacefully in some fat letter book 
appertaining to a Philistine, who knows not the joys 
of collecting, I am sorely tempted to purloin that which 
means little to him, but much to me. Hitherto I have 
sternly resisted the voice of the tempter. 

"Why comes temptation, but for man to meet 
And master, and make crouch beneath his foot, 
And so be pedestaled in triumph." 

A confiding friend once admitted to me that he had 
stolen a set of autographs, and years afterwards tor- 
tured by conscience, made restitution to the true 
owner who had never missed them. 

The London Athenaeum observed in 1855 that "the 
story of what history owes to the autograph collectors 
would make a pretty book". That book has never yet 
been written, but — 



A CERTAIN AFFECTATION OF THE GREAT 

AS the fortunate individuals who are pos- 
sessed of what the world calls greatness 
are necessarily different in capacity and 
endowments from the general body of 
the people, it is perhaps natural that 
they should observe the affairs of life from a point 
of view more elevated and commanding than that 
which is occupied by ordinary human beings. It is 
for this reason, no doubt, that they frequently dis- 
play what we of humbler station are accustomed to 
characterize as affectations. Those who have devoted 
time and labor to the study of the lives of great men 
and women, in order that we may be instructed how 
to "make our lives sublime", will not need to be re- 
minded of particular instances nor to be convinced by the 
production of testimony tending to establish the verity 
of the proposition. We are all familiar with the truth 
that such persons, for example, as Louis XIV, Queen 
Elizabeth, Napoleon, General Winfield Scott, Horace 
Greeley, the Kaiser Wilhelm, and others nearer home, 
were and are mere bundles of affectations. 

I was moved to indulge in these profound reflec- 
tions by the perusal of some remarks in the "Contrib- 
utor's Club" in a number of the Atlantic Monthly, 
entitled "A Great Person and Certain Bores". The 
writer announced that he (or she) "has lately been 
private secretary and literary advisor {sic) to a Great 
Person", and contributed to the enlightment of man- 
kind this gem of wisdom: "The worst enemy to the 
Great Person is the autograph collector. Now, the col- 

6^ 



68 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

lector who buys with good money autographs that are 
already on paper, or who begs from his friends, or 
who knows celebrities well enough to ask them to 
their faces for their signatures, may be, and I am sure 
is, a great nuisance. But he is not a foe to society." 

I have elsewhere expressed the opinion, founded 
partly upon knowledge acquired by a careful examina- 
tion of written and printed records, and partly upon 
facts derived from personal observation, that the truly 
great are not really as much bored by requests for au- 
tographs as minor magnates of literature and of poli- 
tics would have an admiring public believe. I shall 
not, however, attempt to justify or to defend the "pes- 
tilential nuisance" who "writes for autographs". There 
is no need of heaping upon the head of such a pseudo- 
collector any further epithets of scorn. Let us say 
that he is an impertinent intruder and a worm, and let 
it go at that. Away with him ! What interests me is 
to observe that the Great appear to have developed 
their affectation so far as to denounce as a nuisance 
the man who "buys with good money autographs that 
are already on paper." What words of contempt 
would be employed to crush the person who bought 
them with forged notes or with counterfeit coin, or 
who purchased autographs inscribed upon brass, or 
bronze, or imperishable marble, or who made con- 
tracts for the future delivery of autographs in the con- 
fident expectation of a rise in the market value of au- 
tographs, I dare not imagine, but let us for a moment 
examine the merits of the charge preferred by so im- 
portant a personage as a former "private secretary 
and literary 'advisor' to a Great Person." 

It may not profit us to consider what may be the 
duties of a literary advisor to a Great Female Per- 



AFFECTATIONS OF THE GREAT 69 

son. A really Great Person frequently needs the help 
of a private secretary but surely not the services of a 
literary advisor, if that title Is to be taken In Its or- 
dinary and obvious signification. It may be that the 
Great Female Person ought at times to be told what 
kinds of books are appropriate to particular hours of 
the day, or what styles and colors of binding har- 
monize most effectively with certain gowns or with 
the furniture of the apartment devoted to the study 
of the works of the poets, philosophers, or word- 
painters of the past. It may be that the Great Per- 
son has inaccurate ideas of the spelling of English 
words or of the construction of English sentences, but 
I cannot believe that she needs to be advised, let us 
say, that she must not prefer Alfred Austin to John 
Milton, or to discard Stubbs, Freeman and John Rich- 
ard Green in favor of the modern writers of histori- 
cal fiction. The inquiry may, however, be deferred. 
It is enough for the moment to say that the Atlantic 
article contains conclusive, intrinsic evidence that the 
Great Female Person mentioned In it Is great, not by 
reason of Intellect or achievement, but solely because 
of Inherited riches; and that the ex-private secretary 
and ex-literary advisor, notwithstanding a cunning lit- 
tle phrase inserted with intent to deceive. Is also one 
of the bright, alluring, charming, and illogical sex, 
whose members are, we are assured, in our hours of 
ease uncertain, coy and hard to please, and who rise 
to their loftiest sphere only in those uncomfortable 
moments when pain and anguish wring the brow. We 
may even be right In regarding this fabrication of 
libels upon harmless collectors as actually a much 
Greater Person than the wealthy lady who required 
her literary advice and counsel, and I am sure that I 



70 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

would value her autograph far more highly, unless, 
as a million autograph writers, more or less, are ac- 
customed to say, at the foot of a cheque. 

Verily the judgment delivered by the ex-advisor 
whereby she decrees that the collector who buys con- 
titutes himself a nuisance, shows her imperfect ac- 
quaintance with the facts and the law. I fear that she 
promulgated it without due attention to the injunction 
audi alteram partem. If there were any Court of Ap- 
peals of competent jurisdiction, that court would re- 
verse it without hesitation, for manifest error appear- 
ing upon its face. The true collector, as we well 
know, does not "beg from his friends" — it is not neces- 
sary. Nor does he ask celebrities for their signatures. 
He cares little or nothing for the mere signatures of 
living persons. He would no more think of asking a 
great man for his signature than a numismatist would 
think of asking him for a dime. It is one of the de- 
lusions of the half-educated that real autograph collec- 
tors prize signatures. To be sure, a signature of Shakes- 
peare, or of Julius Caesar, or of Judas Iscariot, would 
be valuable, for reasons which may readily be under- 
stood. But nobody in this incarnation is likely to trouble 
any of these personages for a specimen of his handwrit- 
ing. We need not pause to consider the case of the beg- 
gar or the gatherer of "signatures by request". We are 
concerned only with him who "buys with good money". 
It is such a collector whom the ex-advisor addresses in 
an imaginary epistle wherein she saucily says: "If 
you are grown up and hardened in evil ways, if you 
are a professional collector of great men's letters and 
relics, you ought to be — . Perhaps in private and not 
in print the ex-advisor uses language not becoming in 
a self-respecting female. 



AFFECTATIONS OF THE GREAT 71 

We come to the allegation that the collector who buys 
the letters and relics of great men is a nuisance, hard- 
ened in evil ways, who ought to be — whatever the lady 
decrees by way of punishment. The accuser admits that 
such a collector is "not a foe to society". For this, 
much thanks. But when, O advisor, you tell us that 
one who is hardened in evil ways is not a foe to society, 
you would have us believe that your society has no foe 
in him who is an evil-doer; wherefore your society must 
either have an evil-doer as a friend or it must be in- 
different to his evil deeds. This comes of too long an 
association with the rich. 

But why is the collector who buys, a nuisance? A 
nuisance Is something which produces not merely annoy- 
ance but injury to some one. The acquisition and pres- 
ervation of letters and manuscripts of distinguished per- 
sons is surely not of itself injurious to any one. It is 
neither malum prohibitum nor malum in se. If it were, 
the libraries and museums of the civilized world must 
be relegated to the category of nuisances and their 
founders and promoters must be evil-doers indeed. If 
the exposure of Martin Luther's letter in the Vatican 
or the display of the fine Washington in the Bodleian 
is in the nature of a nuisance, let the ex-advlsor make 
the most of it. If in the privacy of my den I preserve 
with fondness my manuscripts of Gray, of a story or 
poem of Charlotte Bronte, or of an epic of Southey, 
or of essays of Irving, or of poems of Swinburne; if 
I love to read and to caress the letters of Tennyson, 
of Browning, of Wordsworth, of Charles Lamb, of 
Dickens and of Thackeray, or of our own Hawthorne, 
Longfellow and Holmes, in what respect are the sen- 
sibilities of even a feminine literary advisor disturbed 
or wounded? If I should make an improper use of 



72 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

the Intimate and familiar confidence of any writer, so 
as to give pain to his friends, I might be justly cen- 
sured; but it is not of such disclosures or publications 
that the criticism is made. Indeed, such disclosures 
usually come from the friends themselves — seldom or 
never from collectors. The indictment relates only to 
the collection and ownership of autograph letters. Sure- 
ly we are right in dismissing the bill of complaint for 
want of equity and in regarding the careless utterance 
as merely an Instance of a common and unworthy affecta- 
tion on the part of Great Persons carried to an extreme. 
The worst of it is that the complaints are so often made 
by very Little Persons, emulating the greater ones. 

Seriously, my skull is not so thick nor my skin so 
thin that I do not discern in this outpouring of the ad- 
visor's spirit an attempt at the lightly humorous. It 
is, however, humor of a cheap and rather time-worn 
vein. The late Irving Browne said that to call a lawyer 
a liar, a physician a murderer, and a clergyman a hypo- 
crite was the favorite amusement of a numerically con- 
siderable portion of mankind. It is also a delight to the 
mildly facetious to read in the columns of the ordinary 
newspaper the stale and common jests about the som- 
nolent policeman, the sugar-sanding grocer, and the dis- 
honest Sunday-school Superintendent. These flat and 
arid pleasantries may perhaps be harmless, but I think 
that the pages of an honored and dignified magazine 
might be employed to better purpose than In dissem- 
inating silliness, the humor of which Is so subtle that 
many casual readers may take It as If It were written in 
sober earnest. To endeavor to bring Into ridicule a 
useful and meritorious occupation is unworthy of a pub- 
lication as venerable and as highly respected as the 
Atlantic Monthly, 



A GEORGIAN POET 

THE designation of literary periods by the 
names of sovereigns Is convenient but not 
very logical or scientific. We are accus- 
tomed to talk of the Elizabethan epoch, the 
time of Queen Anne, the Georgian era, 
and the Victorian age; and we generally understand 
what we mean by those titles. They are no more arti- 
ficial than the division by centuries. There is no defi- 
nite line of demarcation between the last decade of any 
century and the first decade of its successor, nor does 
any Chinese wall separate the closing days of Anne 
from the opening years of the first of the Hanoverians. 
When we speak of Elizabeth, we think of Shakespeare; 
when we speak of Anne, we think of Pope and Swift 
and Addison. The men of letters take precedence of 
the mere hereditary rulers. Anne did nothing Important 
for literature and the Georges did even less. Yet "the 
Georgian era" is a phrase of utility and It conveys an 
impression sufficiently significant. But although Words- 
worth and Coleridge, Scott and Byron, Shelley and 
Keats reached the summit of their poetic fame before 
the fourth George came to the end of his inglorious 
life, it is essentially an impression of that eighteenth 
century which most of us regard as a time of prepara- 
tion for the wonderful century which has just passed 
away. Doubtless it was not as tame and placid as many 
of us are apt to believe; perhaps it was as astonishing 
and as eventful to the people who made its history as 
our own times seem to us. "Every age appears surpris- 

73 



74 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Ing and full of vicissitudes to those that live therein."* 
Whatever may have been the excitements of politics 
and of the drama in those early Georgian days, it was 
surely not a period of great achievements in poetry. 
'' 'Tis an age most unpoetical," wrote Horace Walpole 
to Sir Horace Mann in 1742, and while students have 
assidously endeavored to explain the reasons why, and 
are not always in agreement, they concur generally in 
the conclusion of the witty sage of Strawberry Hill. 
Minto refers to the "common explanation of the utter 
decay of poetry in the eighteenth century, that people 
lived in slavish subservience to narrow and exclusive 
rules of art; that all who felt an impulse to write in 
verse were intimidated into taking artificial standards 
as their guide rather than Nature, that genius was stifled 
by timid and laborious effort after correctness." The 
truth is that there were no great men who felt the 
grand, poetic impulse ; and there was no encouragement 
to avail of poetry as a means of reaching the minds and 
hearts of their fellow-men. "The standard of taste in 
the time of Queen Anne, and till near the end of the 
century, was a self-consciously aristocratic and refined 
society, self-conscious of their superior manners and su- 
perior culture, and disposed to treat the ways of the 
vulgar with amused contempt. Fear of being vulgar, 
fear of being singular — these were the real nightmares 
that sat upon eighteenth century poetry."t The fear 
of being vulgar and of being singular is not characteris- 
tic of our own time ; but what Walpole said of his age 
may well be said of ours. In the Georgian era, politics 
and the play as well as the development of the art of 
prose writing were paramount; in the twentieth cen- 

*Carlyle's Note Books. 141. 

fMfnto: Literature of the Georgian Era. 41. 



A GEORGIAN POET 75 

tury, politics, science, sociology, and the novel are the 
most conspicuous objects of interest. The light of Vic- 
torian poesy faded with the passing of Browning and 
Tennyson, and went out altogether when Swinburne 
joined the ranks of the immortal dead. Already the 
priests of the new thought are telling us to forget 
Browning and Tennyson; but they are giving us noth- 
ing to fill the void left by the vanished masters. Yet 
the poet will come again. Men remain the same and 
in fullness of time the inspired singer will reappear. 
Meanwhile the mediocre will prevail in poetry, 
keeping the lamp burning, however dimly, until the 
flame bursts forth again in brightness. 

It may be doubted whether it profits us to recall 
the memory of the minor poets of the early Georgian 
era, for they were feeble folk, yet they had some in- 
fluence in their generation. Some of their thoughts 
remain in our minds. For the most part they were 
sincere and earnest, and they had noble aspirations, 
however far they may have fallen short of accom- 
plishment. The record of their lives and of their 
work may not be as fascinating as a modern romance, 
but it is not to be despised, for it forms a part of our 
literary history. 

The solemn stateliness of the seventeen hundreds 
was manifested by the publishing of poetry in ponder- 
our quartos. The book I have before me is one of 
them — an attractive example of typographic art, 
bound in a decent crimson half-morocco, with delight- 
ful saffron edges. It is entitled "The Poems of Mark 
Akenside, M. D., London, printed by W. Bowyer 
and J. Nichols, and sold by J. Dodsley, in Pall Mall. 
MDCCLXXII." It contains a portrait of the author, 
exhibiting a gentleman of a heavy, rather mournful 



76 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

countenance, with an expression of pensive dullness. 
The type of the book is a joy to the eye and a rebuke 
to the printers of these careless times. 

It may be a shallow reflection, but nevertheless I 
am confident that it is not wholly without merit, that 
the memory of the poetic doctor is kept alive chiefly 
because his name possesses an alphabetical primacy 
in the catalogue of British Poets and also lends itself 
to a harmless if peurile paranomasia so obvious that 
it has afforded delight to countless thousands who have 
fondly cherished the idea that they were its original 
discoverers. Even the book-loving Irving Browne, 
who was capable of better things, had no scruples 
about telling us in verse that he could — 

"Sit at home and double 
Quite up with pain from Akenside." 

It is by such inanities that many know of Akenside 
who never read a line he wrote. 

The edition of the "Works"— I love those clean 
and comfortable old books, — was published soon after 
the author's death and comprises "The Pleasures of 
the Imagination" in its original as well as in its revised 
form; "Odes on Several Subjects," bitterly abused by 
Samuel Johnson; "Hymn to the Naiads"; and "In- 
scriptions." 

Poetry seems to come in cycles; there are waves of 
it. Surely the tide was at the ebb in the days of Mark 
Akenside. The great Cham of literature, who was 
usually a brutal and often a comical Cham, was strange- 
ly severe about Gray. The judgment of posterity re- 
versed the decision of Johnson in Gray's case, but it has 
aflfirmed the decree in the matter of Akenside. "I think 
we have had enough of Gray," growled Ursa Major; 



A GEORGIAN POET 77 

*'I see they have published a splendid edition of Aken- 
side's works. One bad ode may be suffered, but a 
number of them together make me sick."* Then, 
when Boswell Intervened with his artful encouragement 
of further talk— "Akenslde's distinguished poem is 
his 'Pleasures of the Imagination,' but for my part I 
never could admire it as much as some people do," — 
the mighty Doctor fell into the trap and added, "Sir, 
I could not read it through," to which Boswell ap- 
pended his chirping response, "I have read It through, 
but I did not find any great power In it." It pleases 
me to think that they were chatting about the very edi- 
tion to which my copy belongs. Later, the Doctor 
gave it as his opinion that "Akenside was a superior 
poet, both to Gray and Mason." He said this prob- 
ably to emphasize his odd dislike of Gray rather 
than to eulogize Akenside; a dislike which arose from 
no personal jealousy but from an absolute incompati- 
bility of temperament. When he wrote the Lives of the 
English Poets, he gave to Akenside a good deal of dis- 
criminating praise mingled with some well-merited 
censure. He was too much of a Tory to relish the 
poet's liberal views. 

The prefatory ''Advertisement" in the edition of 
1772 was written by the most devoted of his friends, 
his benefactor Dyson, and the biography which forms 
part of It is a model of conciseness. "The author of 
these poems was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on 
the 9th day of November, 1721. He was educated 
at the Grammar School at Newcastle and at the Uni- 
versities of Edinburgh and Leyden, at the latter of 
which he took his degree of Doctor In Physic. He 



*Boswell (Blrrell's Edition), Hi, 22. This was in 1772. 



78 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

was afterwards admitted by mandamus to the degree 
of Doctor in Physic at the University of Cambridge; 
elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, 
and one of the Physicians of St. Thomas's Hospital, 
and upon the establishment of the Queen's Household, 
appointed one of the Physicians to Her Majesty. He 
died of a putrid fever on the 23d day of June, 1770, 
and is buried in the Parish Church of St. James, West- 
minster." Dyson might well have been a little more 
generous in his disclosures and the description of poor 
Akenside's disease seems needlessly offensive, but it 
is characteristic of the time. Johnson in his Diction- 
ary quotes Quincey's definition of "a putrid fever'* 
as "that kind of a fever, in which the humours, or part 
of them, have so little circulatory motion that they 
fall into an intestine, die and putrefy." This luminous 
gem of eighteenth century medical science is a puzzle 
to our modern understanding. 

Mark Akenside was the son of Mark Akenside and 
Mary Lumsden, his wife. His father was a butcher; 
and Johnson, with the arrogance of a bigoted disciple 
of the Church of England, sneeringly says that he was 
"of the Presbyterian sect." When the young Aken- 
side was a boy of seven, the butcher's cleaver fell upon 
his foot, causing a lameness which was always a source 
of mortification to him. It is said that the accident 
rendered it necessary for him to wear an artificial 
heel. For a time he was under the tuition of Mr. 
Wilson, a dissenting minister, and he attended the 
Grammar School at Newcastle, where, in later years, 
Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell were pupils. He "com- 
posed verses" at an early age. In 1737 he sent a 
poem to the "Gentleman's Magazine," which was 



A GEORGIAN POET 79 

printed in that periodical, although the young author 
was unintroduced and unknown. "It was entitled 
*The Virtuoso'," says Mr. Gosse, "and was written in 
imitation of Spenser in the Spenserian measure. The 
piece consists of only ten stanzas, but they show a re- 
markable skill in versification, and appear to have 
preceded the longer and better known pieces by Shen- 
stone, Thomson, and Gilbert Ridley, which soon after 
made the Spenserian stanza fashionable."* In the 
August number, 1738, the same magazine published 
"A British Philippic," directed against the Spaniards, 
which was so successful that it was reprinted as a folio 
pamphlet. Whether he actually began his most con- 
spicuous poem, "The Pleasures of the Imagination," 
at the age of seventeen, as is asserted, may be doubt- 
ed. He himself says that the plan of the work origin- 
ally occurred to him during a visit to Morpeth, within 
hearing of "the mossy falls of solitary Wensbeck's 
limpid stream" ; but like Gibbon's famous account of 
his conception of the History, this may be only a 
poetic way of recording the first budding of an idea 
destined to be carried out in an indefinite future. At 
all events he published the work in 1744 and must 
have spent some years in its composition. Meanwhile 
he had been sent, at eighteen, to the University of 
Edinburgh in order to prepare for the ministry, but 
he soon found the profession of medicine more attrac- 
tive than theology. 

He had received the benefit of some funds supplied 
by the Dissenters to aid in the education of students; 
the Principal of Mansfield College informed Dr. George 
Birkbeck Hill that "at or soon after the Revolution a 



■Dictionary of National Biography, Title "Akenside." 



8o EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

■^Fund Board' was founded; from it grants were made 
to students to help them to proceed to a Continental or 
Scotch university, or even to find education at home."* 
He returned to the donors what he had received, when 
he abandoned the idea of becoming a minister; an hon- 
orable act which scarcely deserves the sneer of an anony- 
mous American writer, who makes the gratuitous sug- 
gestion that the means came "obviously out of some one 
else's pocket." What of it? He repaid the money and 
proved his honorable and commendable judgment of 
the matter. 

Some remarks of Doctor Johnson upon this change 
of purpose are not undeserving of remembrance. 
"Whether," says the old tyrant, whom we love even 
when he is most dictatorial and overbearing, "when 
he resolved not to be a dissenting minister he ceased to 
be a Dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained an 
unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and 
thought liberty if a zeal which sometimes disguises from 
the world, and not rarely from the mind which it pos- 
sesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth or de- 
grading greatness; and of which the immediate tend- 
ency is innovation and anarchy, an impetuous eagerness 
to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall 
be established." There are several eminent personages 
who enjoy a vast amount of popularity in our own time 
who may well take to heart these words of the sturdy 
Doctor. 

In Edinburgh, Akenside continued to study for three 
years. He was made a member of the Medical So- 
ciety of Edinburgh on December 30, 1740. In the same 



^Johnson's Lives (G. B. Hill's Edn.), iii, 411, Note. 
fOriginally ''a furious and outrageous zeal, etc." Boswell's 
Johnson, Birrell's Edn. 



A GEORGIAN POET 8i 

year he privately printed a book of verses, Including 
an ode "On the Winter Solstice," and an elegy on 
"Love." Dugald Stewart, in his "Elements of the 
Philosophy of the Human Mind," afterwards wrote 
of him: "There are various passages in Akenside's 
works which will be read with additional pleasure 
when It Is known that they were not entirely suggested 
by fancy. I allude to those passages where he be- 
trays a secret consciousness of powers adapted to a 
higher station of life than fell to his lot. Akenside, 
when a medical student at Edinburgh, was a member 
of the Medical Society, then recently formed, and was 
eminently distinguished by the eloquence which he dis- 
played in the course of the debates. Dr. Robinson, 
who was at that time a student of divinity in the same 
university, told me that he was frequently led to attend 
these meetings, chiefly to hear the speeches of Aken- 
side, the great object of whose ambition then was a 
seat in parliament, a situation which, he was sanguine 
enough to flatter himself, he had some prospect of ob- 
taining, and for which he considered his talents to be 
much better adapted than for the profession he had 
chosen." He was what was known as a "republican" 
in sentiment, as poor young men under like circum- 
stances are apt to be; but later, with the bait of oflSice 
held out to him, he experienced a change of heart. De- 
spite his oratorical occupations, he must have been 
working upon his poetical masterpiece. He went to 
Leyden in 1744, receiving his degree from that uni- 
versity on May i6th of the same year. 

He had submitted his Pleasures of the Imagination 
to Dodsley in 1743, and Johnson heard the publisher 
relate that when the copy was first offered to him the 
price asked was one hundred and twenty pounds — 



82 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Nichols says, guineas. The price was one which Dods- 
ley "was not inclined to give precipitately"; but he 
showed the manuscript to Pope, who "advised him not 
to make a niggardly offer, for this was not an every-day 
writer." As it turned out, the publisher must have 
made a good profit from the transaction, for the work 
became so popular that several editions were exhausted 
in quick succession. 

The title had been used by Addison in the Specta- 
tor. The poem was published anonymously, and Dr. 
Johnson relates a story, the truth of which Boswell 
doubts, that one Richard Rolt "went over to Dublin, 
published an edition of it, and put his own name to it. 
Upon the fame of this he lived for several months, 
being entertained at the best tables as the 'ingenious 
Mr. Rolt'."* It was said that "the demand for several 
successive republications was so quick" that the poet 
did not have sufficient time "in any of the intervals 
to complete the whole of his corrections. "t A cheap 
edition, with the author's name, was published four 
months after the original appearance of the poem. 

If anything further were needed to "advertise" the 
young author, it was supplied by means of that useful 
aid to the growth of fame, a controversy. Akenside, 
in the words of Johnson, "adopted Shaftesbury's fool- 
ish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the discovery 
of truth." He emphasized his approval in a note, and 
avowed his admiration for Shaftesbury by calling him 
"the noble restorer of ancient philosophy." Warburton 
assailed him on this subject in Remarks on Several 
Occasional Reflections (1744), Akenside's friend 



*Boswell (Birrell's Edn.), ii, 31. 

ijohnson's Brit. Poets (G. B. Hill's Edn.), iii, 412, Notes. 



A GEORGIAN POET 83 

Dyson took up the cause in an Epistle to Mr. Warhur- 
ton occasioned by his Treatment of the Author of the 
Pleasures of the Imagination,"^ the greater part of 
which Mr. Dyce is inclined to beHeve was composed 
by Akenside himselff Warburton republished his re- 
marks in a postscript to The Divine Legation, in 1766. 
Akenside returned to the battle in a satire on Warbur- 
ton's edition of Pope, entitled An Ode to Thomas Ed- 
wards.^ It was indeed, as Dr. Johnson calls it, a long 
and eager discussion of an idle question; one of those 
wearisome disputes of which they were so fond in 
Georgian days. Although Johnson says that in the re- 
vised poem the lines which had given occasion for War- 
burton's objections were omitted, George Birkbeck 
Hill calls attention to the fact that they were merely 
transferred, with a few minor corrections, from Book 
iii, 259-277 to Book ii, 523-541. 

Thus at the age of twenty-four he found himself 
in the posession of a high literary reputation. On 
obtaining his degree of Doctor of Physic at Leyden, 
which, after only a month of study, he received on May 
16, 1744, he had published, according to the custom 
in the German University, a thesis in Latin, called De 
Ortu et Incremento Foetus Humani, marked by some 
originality. He began practice at Northampton; but 
finding Sir James Stonehouse, an eminent physician and 
divine, already in full possession of the field, he re- 
moved in 1745 to North End, Hampstead, where he 
remained for more than two years. It is worthy of 
mention that after more than a century had passed since 
his brief sojourn there, writers of "literary pilgrim- 



*Gent. Mag., 1744, p. 288. 

fDyce. Aldine Poets. Akenside. 14. 

^Odes, ii, 10 (1751). 



84 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

ages'' recorded the fact that he dwelt In the same lit- 
tle street where Arbuthnot and Mrs. Barbauld once 
lived, where Tennyson's mother died, and where Keats 
wrote Endymion. He passed a good deal of time in 
the society of his friend, Jeremiah Dyson, whom he 
first met in Leyden. In 1837 Wordsworth wrote: — 
"I am not unfrequently a visitor on Hampstead Heath, 
and seldom pass by the entrance of Mr. Dyson's villa 
on Golder's Hill close by without thinking of the pleas- 
ure which Akenside often had there." He adds: "He 
was fond of sitting in St. James's Park, with his eyes 
upon Westminster Abbey.* In one of his Odes,'f which 
seem to our modern taste so absurd and which were 
never esteemed, Akenside apostrophizes, "Thy verdant 
scenes, O Goulder's hill," and its "steep aerial way," 
beseeching it to 

"Call thy sprightly breezes round. 
Dissolve this rigid cough profound." 

Golder's Hill, now becoming a pretty suburb of Lon- 
don, is almost classic ground. "This picture composes 
well" said Gainsborough, as he stood with Sir Joshua 
upon the Hill. "Yes, beautifully! what aerial per- 
spective!" answered Reynolds, "'Tis like viewing Na- 
ture through the medium of a lens." Here it was that 
Keats wrote on some scraps of paper, between break- 
fast and lunch, "sitting on a grass-plot under a plane 
tree," the "Ode to the Nightingale." Akenside also re- 
fers to his friend, Mr. Cofferer Dyson, observing 
that— 



*Memoirs of Wordsworth, 1851, H, 350. 

fOn Recovering from a Fit of Sickness in the Country, ii, I2. 



A GEORGIAN POET 85 

"While around his sylvan scene 
My Dyson led the white wing'd hours, 
Oft from the Athenian Academic bowers 
'Their sages came." 

Leaving Hampstead to seek a wider field, he decided 
to remove to London. Hawkins says that Dyson and 
Akenside "dwelt together at North End, Hampstead, 
during the summer, frequenting the Long Room and all 
Clubs and Assemblies of the inhabitants" ; and now this 
rich and devoted friend "settled him in a small house in 
Bloomsbury Square, and enabled him to keep a char- 
iot."* The generous benefactor further allowed him 
£300 a year and set to work to gain for the poet-phy- 
sician a comfortable practice. 

Dyson was a Secretary of the Treasury and after- 
wards Cofferer to the Houshold. He did something be- 
sides "leading the white wing'd hours," for "he was 
supposed to have all the Journals of the House of 
Commons by heart" t — rather a vigorous supposition. 
On March 23, 1774, Horace Walpole wrote of Gren- 
ville's bill for trying elections: "It passed as rapidly 
as if it had been for a repeal of Magna Charta, 
brought in by Mr. Cofferer Dyson." Mr. Dyce gives 
a passage from an early letter of Akenside to Dyson,iy 
in which he writes: "I never think of my connection 
with you without being happier and better for the re- 
flection. I enjoy, by means of it, a more animated, a 
more perfect relish of every social, of every natural 
pleasure. My own character, by means of it, is become 
an object of veneration and applause to myself." Dr. 



*Hawkins' Johnson^ p. 243. 
tGent. Mag., 1776, p. 416. 

iJDyce, 19; G. B. Hill's Notes to Johnson's Akenside, iii, 
414. 



36 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Hill thinks that if this had been written later "it would 
have been thought a parody of Boswell in his let- 
ters to Johnson." Dyson certainly gave substantial 
proof of his affection. 

Akenside had not accomplished much in his prac- 
tice at Northampton and Hampstead and it cannot be 
said that in the beginning he was very successful in 
London. Mr. Gosse remarks that "the faults of his 
intellect and his character now began to reveal them- 
selves. He became mentally fossilized by pedantry 
and conceit, and he gave way to a native tendency to 
arrogance, which grew to be a great disadvantage 
to him." No doubt he was spoiled by Dysonian mu- 
nificence. He was made a Fellow of the Royal So- 
ciety and also a Fellow of the College of Physicians 
in 1754. His Cambridge degree, awarded in Janu- 
ary, 1753, was, as we have seen, conferred "by man- 
damus," by which is doubtless meant that it was given 
in pursuance of a request from the Chancellor of the 
University. As physician to St. Thomas's Hospital 
and fourth censor of the College, he read the Gul- 
stonian lectures in Anatomy in 1755, a course estab- 
lished in the seventeenth century by Theodore Gouls- 
ton or Gulston. In these lectures he advanced opin- 
ions in regard to "the lymphatics" in opposition to 
those of Boerhave, which showed his courage. This 
gave rise to a dispute with Dr. Alexander Monro, 
then an eminent professor of anatomy in Edinburgh, 
who accused Akenside of plagiarism from him, but 
the better opinion is that he did not substantiate his 
accusation. In 1756 he dehvered the Crounian lec- 
tures. This was a course founded by the widow of 
Croone or Croune, in 1706. Dr. Johnson says that 
he "began to give for these lectures a history of the 



A GEORGIAN POET 87 

Revival of Learning, from which he soon desisted." 
Kippis in Biographica Britannica (i. 107), whom 
Johnson closely follows, says that "he gave up the 
course in disgust," because some objected to the sub- 
ject as "foreign to the institution," but Mr. Dyce 
remarks that "the course is always of three lectures, 
and three he gave." He was not, however, fitted for 
the practice of medicine. It is very well for friendly 
writers to say that "he possessed too much independ- 
ence of mind to have recourse to those artifices by 
which medical men in too many instances contrive to 
creep into practice"; that is the common excuse for 
men who fail. He was unfitted by temperament for 
the duties of a profession which demands the most 
gentle tact, the most cheerful self-sacrifice and the 
most unremitting labor to ensure reputation and suc- 
cess. We read much of the roughness and brusque- 
ness of men like Abernethy, but with Akenside the 
faults were not merely of manner; they were faults 
of character. He was utterly unsympathetic. Still, 
it is said that towards the close of his life his prac- 
tice had become "very large and fashionable." 

In London he devoted little time to poetry, but he 
.published several medical essays, a list of which is 
given in Biographica Britannica. Among these was a 
discourse on the dysentery {De Dysenteria Commen- 
tarius, 1764), much praised for its Latinity. In 
March, 1745, he had put forth his collection of Odes, 
and in November, 1744, The Epistle to Curio, a satire 
on William Pulteney, which many regarded as his 
best poem. Macaulay said of it: "If Akenside had 
left lyric composition to Gray and Collins, and had 
employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he 
might have disputed the preeminence of Dryden." 



88 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Pulteney had opposed Walpole, and those who, like 
Akenslde, were hoping for reform, looked upon him as 
the leader of "the better element," but when Pulteney 
became a peer and surrendered to the forces of cor- 
ruption, they poured forth upon him their vials of 
wrath and likened him to that Curio, the friend of 
Cicero, who had been the advocate of liberty but who 
went over to Caesar from motives of personal ambi- 
tion. The poet tells of the lofty expectations enter- 
tained of Curio's patriotic and disinterested zeal for 
freedom, but lamenting that when the "deciding hour" 
arrived he proved false, exclaims: 

" 'Twas then— O shame! O trust how ill repaid I 
O Latium, oft by faithless sons betrayed! — 
'Twas then — What frenzy on thy reason stole? 
What spells unsinewed thy determined soul? 
Is this the man in Freedom's cause approved? 
The man so great, so honoured, so beloved? 
This patient slave by tinsel chains allured? 
This wretched suitor for a boon abjured? 
This Curio, hated and despised by all. 
Who fell himself to work his country's fall?" 

The final verses are not without dignity when he 
says of "wise liberty" : 

"Protect her from yourselves, ere yet the flood 
Of golden luxury, which commerce pours 
Hath spread that selfish fierceness through your 

blood. 
Which not her highest discipline indures. 
Snatch from fantastic demagogues her cause; 
Dream not of Numa's manners, Plato's laws, 
A wiser founder and a nobler plan, 
O sons of Alfred, were for you assign'd: 
Bring to that birthright but an equal mind. 
And no sublimer lot will fate reserve for man.'* 



A GEORGIAN POET 89 

Beset by his propensity to rewrite his productions, he 
transformed the Epistle into an Ode and in the proc- 
ess weakened it sadly. 

The Odes were his poorest compositions. "Nothing 
favorable can be said" of them, according to Johnson. 
Horace Walpole, writing on March 29, 1745, after 
referring to Lee, adds: "There is another of those 
tame geniuses, a Mr. Akenside, who writes Odes; in 
one he says: 'Light the tapers, urge the fire.' " Gray 
wrote on March 8, 1758, of Dodsley^s Collection, 
"The two last volumes are worse than the four first; 
particularly Dr. Akenside is in a deplorable way." No 
one seems to have had a good word for them. He 
was hampered by rhymes. As the savage Quarterly 
said of Keats in the memorable review of Endy- 
mion, "He seems to us to write a line at random, and 
then he follows not the thought excited by this line 
but that suggested by the rhyme with which it con- 
cludes. There is hardly a complete couplet inclosing a 
complete idea in the whole book." In blank verse, as 
Johnson points out, Akenside was exempt from the 
necessity of closing the sense with the couplet; and 
there was no interference with the exuberance of his 
imagery and description.* In 1746 he wrote the "Hymn 
to the Naiads," mention of which will be made later on; 
in January, 1746, he became editor of the Museum, 
Dodsley's magazine, for which he wrote prose essays; 
in 1748 he published "Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon; 
in 1749, "The Remonstrance of Shakespeare," and in 
1758, "An Ode to the Country Gentlemen of England," 
as well as a large number of new pieces, including "The 
Hymn to the Naiads," which he put forth in the sixth 

*Dyce, p. 49. 



90 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

volume of Dodsley's "Miscellany." The "Call to 
Aristippus," a pamphlet in verse, appeared in 1758. 

His service as physician in the Hospital — where 
he became assistant in January, 1759, and two months 
later principal physician — was not distinguished by 
much success, however sound may have been his medi- 
cal learning or however great his skill. Dr. Lettsom, 
who was a student there, is reported as saying that "he 
was the most supercilious and unfeeling physician that 
he had hitherto known." His temper was bad; he 
was foolishly proud and arrogant, brutal in his be- 
havior to the poorer class of patients; involved by his 
irascible nature in perpetual disputes. He changed his 
politics and became a Tory to obtain the post of Phy- 
sician to the Queen in 176 1; but then, as now, party 
ties sat loosely upon men when it was a question of 
place; enthusiasts for liberty and popular rights are 
generally not unlike the two Kings of Barataria in The 
Gondoliers. Many excuses have been urged for his 
failings; his lowly birth, his delicate health, his irrita- 
ble nerves, his early success, and the insolent caste feel- 
ing of society, which aroused all the bitterness of a sen- 
sitive disposition. 

That he was highly esteemed as a poet is beyond dis- 
pute. We know what Pope thought of him before he 
became famous. Upon the publication of his Ode to 
the Country Gentlemen of England, the Monthly Re- 
view said he "well deserved to be stiled the Poet of 
the Community," and Doctor Johnson not only wrote 
that "he is to be commended as having fewer artifices 
of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song," 
but said of The Pleasures of the Imagination that it 
was "an example of great felicity of genius and uncom- 
mon amplitude of acquisitions." 



A GEORGIAN POET 91 

He talked well, although devoid of any sense of 
humor, and he never mastered the peculiar style of 
rough repartee which was so much in vogue in the 
eighteenth century. He avoided "the bibulous and glu- 
tonous element" of that period. It is written of him 
that his "outward ensemble was eminently what the vul- 
gar would term 'guyable.' He was not a little of a fop. 
He was plain-featured and yet assuming in manner. * 

* * His prim formality of manner, his sword and 
stiff-curled wig, his small and sickly face trying to main- 
tain an expression impressively dignified, made him a 
ludicrous figure, which his contemporaries never tired 
of ridiculing and caricaturing."* Henderson, the ac- 
tor, said that Akenside, when he walked the streets, 
looked for all the world like one of his own Alexan- 
drines set upright."t Smollett made fun of him in 
Peregrine Pickle, where he served as a model for the 
physician who gave a comical dinner in the fashion of 
the ancients, and who was "a young man in whose air 
and countenance appeared all the uncouth gravity and 
supercilious self-conceit of a physician piping hot from 
his studies.!! * * * Not contented with display- 
ing his importance in the world of taste and po- 
lite literature, his vanity manifested itself in ar- 
rogating certain material discoveries in the prov- 
ince of physick. * * * He was strangely possessed 
with the opinion that he himself was inspired by the 
soul of Pindar." But it was something to have been 
burlesqued by Smollett. 

One of his biographers, Charles Bucke, says of him : 



*See sketch in World's Best Literature, vol. I. 

tDyce, 76. 

jf Peregrine Pickle, 42, 43. 



92 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"The features of Akenside were expressive and manly 
In a very high degree; but his complexion was pale, 
and his deportment solemn. He dressed too in a very 
precise manner, and wore a powdered wig in stiff curl. 
In respect to disposition, he is said to have been irrita- 
ble, and to have had little restraint of his temper be- 
fore strangers, with whom he was precise and cere- 
monious, stiff, and occasionally sententious and dicta- 
torial. * * * ^e had a high sense of his own 
merits, and when persons of an inferior cast presumed 
upon their ignorance, or want of good breeding, to in- 
trude their observations too unceremoniously, Aken- 
side denied himself the satisfaction of chastising their 
presumption by the adoption of a manner perhaps too 
severe, satirical, and splenetic. But in the society of 
those mild and gentle spirits who admired his genius 
and respected his virtues, he was kindness itself. His 
language flowed chastely, gracefully, and eloquently; 
and his varied knowledge, argumentative reasonings, 
and nice distinctions, his fine appreciation of philo- 
sophical allusions, and keen relish for the beauties of 
creation, would display themselves in pure and copious 
streams of eloquence^ never, perhaps, surpassed by the 
greatest masters of social life the world ever knew. 
His memory was at once discriminating and compre- 
hensive. He retained all the riches of art, science, 
and history, legislation, poetry, and philosophy; and 
these he would draw out and embody to suit the occa- 
sion required, in a manner not more wonderful to 
those who were partially informed than delightful to 
those who could follow his track, and continue with 
him to the end. Yet he is said to have in general, 
wanted gaiety of heart in society. He was naturally 
of a cheerful temper; but his cheerfulness was ac- 
companied by a mellowness of feeling which some- 
times relapsed into melancholy." 

A cheerful, mellow melancholy must be a wonderful 
thing. All this, which the artless biographer — who is 
guiltless of the italics— doubtless meant for praise, es- 



A GEORGIAN POET 93 

tablishes the fact that Akenside was a solemn, dis- 
agreeable, conceited creature of the species to which 
men in nearly every age have given the title of "ass", 
— never pleasant except when surrounded by flatterers, 
and even under such favorable conditions a stupendous, 
lugubrious bore, always a cad of the most offensive sort. 
It is perhaps one of the blessings of our day that in 
conversation "pure and copious streams of eloquence" 
are quickly and effectually dammed. 

Mr. Gosse quotes from a contemporary of the poet 
this description: 

"One leg of Dr. Akenside was considerably shorter 
than the other, which was in some measure remedied 
by the aid of a false heel. He had a pale, strumous 
countenance, but was always very neat and elegant in 
his dress. He wore a large white wig and carried a 
long sword. He would order the servants (at Christ's 
Hospital) on his visiting days to precede him with 
brooms to clear the way, and prevent the patients 
from too nearly approaching him." 

When Johnson made his well-known remark about 
the jealousy which some men feel in regard to friends 
who rise above them, he moved Boswell to refer, as an 
example, to the withering of "the early friendship be- 
tween Charles Townshend and Akenside." The latter 
alludes to it himself when he says, in his "Ode to 
Townshend": 

"For not imprudent of my loss to come, 
I sav/ from Contemplation's quiet cell 
His feet ascending to another home. 

Where public praise and envied greatness dwell." 

It is more charitable to think that the cessation of 
their intimacy was due more to the absorption of 
Townshend in his career as "the spoiled child of the 



94 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

House of Commons" than to petty envy on Akenside's 
part. Notwithstanding the personal pecuharities of 
the poet he appears to have had the faculty of winning 
friends, from the time when, at an early age, he at- 
tracted the regard of Doctor Philip Doddridge, the 
hymn writer. Hawkins says that "his conversation was 
of the most delightful kind," but that he lacked "that 
quality which Swift somewhere calls an aldermanly vir- 
tue, discretion."* 

Warton thought that "of all our poets perhaps Aken- 
side was the best Greek scholar since Milton."t It is 
interesting to know that he was not a good reader of 
his own verse.ll His great biographer refers to his am- 
bitious ostentation of elegance and literature, and re- 
gards him as having a high place "among the wits"; 
but Johnson did not use the word in the sense to which 
modern usage has restricted it; he meant only "those 
who have knowledge." 

His poetry was technical rhetoric usually displayed 
in good blank verse ; but it was pedantic and prosaic at 
its best. Doctor Minto seems to think that his admira- 
tion of Shakespeare is quite commendable, and in the 
book from which we have quoted gives twice a long 
extract from the "Remonstrance" which Akenside saw 
fit to deliver in 1749 when a company of French play- 
ers acted by subscription at Drury Lane, in which the 
"Bard of Avon", as the pompous physician probably 
called him, is made to protest against the ruthless "in- 
vasion of his domain." His favorites, however, were 
Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Hutchinson, from 



*Hawkins' Johnson^ 242, 247. 
fEssay on Pope, ii, 455. 

IJDyce, 53. 



A GEORGIAN POET 95 

whom, as well as from Plato, he took most of his ma- 
terial. But we cannot forget that his principal work 
was the precursor of Campbell's Pleasures of Hope 
and of Rogers' Pleasures of Memory , although both 
of these more modern poems are almost as obsolete as 
their prototype. 

Expressions of personal preference are dangerous 
now, because the youthful sages who "do" the book 
reviews in the newspapers are the only critics who are 
permitted to indulge in them. When ordinary men 
venture to infringe upon this journalistic monopoly and 
timidly disclose their own views, they are told that "to 
people who have the habit of thinking for themselves 
they are unsatisfactory"* — ^whereby all criticism is 
wiped from the earth by one Podsnappian wave of the 
hand. But as newspaper reviewers neither know nor 
care much about Akenside — should one of them ever 
deign to cast his lordly eye upon this page he will forth- 
with insist that he has been familiar with Akenside 
from his cradle — I may perhaps be suffered to say that 
I like best his "Hymn to the Naiads," notwithstanding 
its ponderous dignity, not altogether appropriate in an 
address to nymphs. Gosse says that it is beautiful and 
perhaps the most "elegant" of his productions. There 
is power in the lines : 

"Down they rush 
From Nysa's vine-impurpled cliff, the dames 
Of Thrace, the Satyrs, and the unruly Fawns, 
With old Silenus, reeling through the crowd 
Which gambols round him, in convulsions wild 
Tossing their limbs, and brandishing in air 
The ivy-mantled thyrsus, or the torch 



*The New York Times, July 10, 1909. 



96 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Through black smoke flaming, to the Phrygian pipe's 
Shrill voice, and to the clashing cymbals mix'd 
With shrieks and frantic uproar." 

One of the odes affords a fair example of what may 
be regarded as his best style — "On a Sermon against 
Glory"- 

*'Come, then, tell me, sage divine, 
Is it an offense to own 
That our bosoms e'er incline 

Toward immortal glory's throne? 
For with me nor pomp, nor pleasure, 
Bourbon's might, Braganza's treasure. 
So can fancy's dream rejoice 
To conciliate reason's choice. 
As one approving word of her impartial voice. 

If to spurn at noble praise 

Be the passport to thy heaven, 
Follow thou those gloomy ways : 

No such law to me was given. 
Nor, I trust, shall I deplore me 
Faring like my friends before me; 
Nor an holier place desire 
Than Timoleon's arms acquire. 
And TuUy's curule chair, and Milton's golden lyre." 

The most important of the poems, comprising about 
two thousand lines, divided into three Books, was an 
attempt to describe the sources, methods, and results 
of imagination and to portray the pleasurable feelings 
derived from its exercise, and from the study of nature, 
art, and history. He announces his purpose at the out- 
set: 

"With what attractive charms this goodly frame 
Of nature touches the consenting hearts 



A GEORGIAN POET 97 

Of mortal men; and what the pleasing stores 
Which beauteous imitation thence derives 
To deck the poet's or the painter's toil; 
My verse unfolds." 

But it is not desirable to multiply quotations from 
long poems : they seldom do full justice to the author 
and when torn from the context are of little value in 
enabling a reader to arrive at a fair judgment. Aken- 
side's works are included in almost every collection of 
^'British Poets," and if any one has sufficient curiosity 
to pursue the subject, the means of information are 
within easy reach. The standard edition is that which 
was edited by Alexander Dyce and published in 1834. 

Much has been written about The Pleasures of the 
Imagination, and the reviewers unite in ascribing to it 
the merits of elevated sentiments, poetic beauty, and 
high philosophy, expressed in dignified measures and 
harmonious periods ; but they temper their praise by re- 
ferring to the length of the sentences, the needless mul- 
tiplication of words, and the redundancy of the imagery. 
Campbell analyzes the work, but while he concedes to 
the poet a high zeal of classical feeling and a graceful 
development of the philosophy of taste in the purely 
ethical and didactic parts of his subject, he thinks that 
sweetness is wanting, that the writer does not arouse 
the emotions, and that he appeals too seldom to ex- 
amples from nature.* Campbell dwells upon the cold- 
ness and tediousness of the episode of Harmodius, 
omitted in the revision ; and another commentator says : 

"Much of it (note especially the episode of PIsIs- 
tratus at the beginning of Book III) is literally prose 
cut into lengths." The reader of to-day will find his 



*Campbeirs Specimens of the British Poets. 



98 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

own Impressions well described in the Life by John- 
son: "His images are displayed with such luxuriance 
of expression, that they are hidden, like Butler's 
Moon, by a 'Veil of Light'; they are forms fantas- 
tically lost under superfluity of dress. Pars minima 
est ipsa puella sui. The words are multiplied till the 
sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind, 
and settles in the ear. The reader wanders through 
the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, and sometimes 
delighted; but after many turnings in the flowery laby- 
rinth, comes out as he went in. He marked little, 
and laid hold on nothing." 

Gray wrote of it on April 26, 1744: 

"To show you that I am a judge, as well as my coun- 
trymen, I will tell you, though I have rather turned it 
over than read it (but no matter, no more have they), 
that it seems to me above the middling; and now and 
then for a little while, rises even to the best, particularly 
in description. It is often obscure and even unintel- 
ligible, and too much affected with the Hutchinsonian 
jargon. In short, its great fault is that it was pub- 
lished at least nine years too early; and so methinks, 
in a few words, a la mode de Temple, I have very 
pertly despatched what, perhaps, may for several 
years have employed a very ingenious man, worth 
fifty of myself." 

Hazlitt indeed liked the revised poem best, but he 
was alone in his opinion as far as I can ascertain. But 
Gray disliked Akenside "and in general all poetry in 
blank verse except Milton." 

He could not let his chief poem alone; and from 
1757 until his death he was engaged in remodeling it. 
Both versions, original and revised, are given in the 
edition of 1772. He began a fourth book, but wrote 



A GEORGIAN POET 99 

only one hundred and thirty lines. It was from this 
unfinished book that Wordsworth took the motto to 
Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems (1835), 

"Poets * * * dwell on earth 
To clothe whatever the soul admires and [or] loves 
With language and with numbers." 

The later revision exemplifies the truth of the theory 
that poets seldom improve their published work by 
emendations. Doctor Johnson says of the revision that 
"he seems to have somewhat contracted his diffusion; 
but I know not whether he has gained in closeness what 
he has lost in splendor." Macaulay says he spoiled it, 
and another critic observes that he "stuffed it with in- 
tellectual horsehair." The truth of these remarks may 
be perceived by comparing these opening lines of the 
revision with the corresponding lines of the original: 

"With what enchantment nature's goodly scene 
Attracts the sense of mortals; how the mind 
For its own eye doth objects nobler still 
Prepare; how men by various lessons learn 
To judge of beauty's praise; what raptures fill 
The breast with fancy's native arts indow'd 
And what true culture guides it to renown; 
My verse unfolds." 

The original is stiff enough, but this is even more stilted. 
It is not discreditable to him that he should have 
regarded his work so seriously as to toil over it in the 
hope of improving it; but the first glow of his youthful 
enthusiasm was better than the laborious effort of his 
maturity. He did, however, anticipate some of Doc- 
tor Johnson's criticisms. The Doctor complained of the 
viewing of "the Ganges from Alpine heights" in the 
lines (Book i, 177) — 



100 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"Who that from Alpine heights, his labouring eye 
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey 
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave." 

This had been changed so as to read: 

"Who that from heights aerial sends his eye 
Around a wild horizon, and surveys 
Indus or Ganges rolling his broad wave." 

(Book i, line 232, Revision.) 

The Doctor further said: "And the pedant surely 
intrudes — but when was blank verse without pedantry? 
— when he tells how " 'Planets absolve the fated rounds 
of Time.' " But the lines (Book i, 194) were changed 
in the later work and are : 

"Bend the reluctant planets to move each 
Round its perpetual year." 

(Book i, line 252, Revision.) 

This indicates that Johnson had never taken the 
trouble to read the revised poem. 

In the latter part of his life he produced an occasion- 
al ode or dissertation. He lived for a time in Craven 
street, but removed in 1760 to a house in Burlington 
street which he occupied at the time of his death. He 
was only in his forty-ninth year when, on June 23, 
1770, he was carried away by that "putrid fever," and 
it is a coincidence that Shenstone died at the same age 
and of the same disease. It is said that he died in the 
bed in which Milton died. On June 28 he was buried 
in the church of St. James. 

There was no mention of his death in the Annual 
Register or even in the Gentleman's Magazine, to which 
he had been so frequent a contributor. His life was 



A GEORGIAN POET loi 

by no means a failure : he attracted the attention of his 
contemporaries; his poems were admired in his own 
generation; and although he was never the idol of an 
hour, his merits were recognized by the leaders of 
thought in his day. He has won immortality of a cer- 
tain kind, although not the immortality of quotation. 
He foreshadowed in a vague way the return of the 
poet to the field of nature. He was toiling under cir- 
cumstances which were not favorable to his work. It 
has been observed that the poet "should preach or poet- 
ize for his age, should elevate and beautify the ideas 
which are current in it." But the ideas which were 
current in England during his time were not susceptible 
of much beautifying or elevation. A lofty and orig- 
inal genius might have accomplished something in that 
direction, but Akenside had little or no originality; he 
built up his verses with materials derived from the 
books which he preferred; he was a manufactured poet, 
without a spark of genius. Despite his vanity and con- 
ceit, he must have had an uneasy consciousness of the 
inferiority of his work, or he would not have wasted 
so much time in amending it and striving to polish it 
when what was needed was substance rather than pol- 
ish. The mania for revising one's own work almost 
always indicates irresolution and a lack of confidence in 
its merit. 

He was about the latest of the machine poets. The 
year of his death was the year of Wordsworth's birth; 
and as with the elder poet the sun of the old school was 
setting, with the younger poet began the dawn of the 
day when the artificial vanished and the fragrance of 
the early morning of poesy once more rejoiced the 
minds and the senses of mankind. 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 

I 

A SUCCESSFUL lawyer whose name is as- 
sociated with no great causes; a leader 
in literature whose only book was a 
mere collection of essays reprinted from 
a magazine ; a renowned talker who left 
to posterity no legacy of memorable sayings; Francis 
Jeffrey owes his fame, or so much of it as survives 
him sixty years after his death, chiefly to his work as 
a writer of reviews. 

The popularity and influence of periodical Re- 
views have suffered so seriously in these days of mod- 
ern culture that they may be said to have disappeared. 
But there was a time when the Review was all-power- 
ful. Whether its decline is due to the vast increase in 
the number of readers, or to the lowering of the level 
of education, or to the fact — if it be a fact — announced 
recently by a publisher, that ''to-day the popular au- 
thor addresses himself to women, since men no longer 
read books," or to the growing independence of read- 
ers who resent attempts to guide or to control their 
judgments, only one extremely sure of himself would 
attempt to decide. The authority of the Review was 
never as great in America as it was in England; the 
old North American, suflficiently heavy in its prime, 
ponderously imitative of British models, was the sole 
publication of that character in this country which de- 
served the name, and while it is still a magazine and 

103 



104 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

preserves the title, it has become only a repository for 
articles too serious for use in the much be-pictured 
and advertisement-crowded "monthlies" which serve 
to amuse the idler and find their principal marts in the 
news-stands of the street, the hotel and the railway sta- 
tion. Yet in the earlier half of the last century the 
British Reviews were the chief means by which the 
leaders of thought essayed to reach the minds of men 
and to give them instruction in politics as well as in 
literature. 

Before the founding of the Edinburgh Review m 
1802, the magazines which pretended to do the work 
or reviewing were but poor things, as dull as the dull- 
est of periodicals in the eighteenth century, and those 
were very dull indeed. There was the Monthly Re- 
view, established in 1749, conducted by Ralph Grif- 
fiths, "who starved and bulhed Goldsmith," and later 
by his son, which lasted until 1845 ^^^ ^^^ in its earli- 
est years perhaps the best of the lot. Jeffrey wrote 
for it occasionally. In June, July, and November, 
1802, he published in the Monthly articles on 
White's Etymoligon and Southey's Thalaha. There 
were also the Critical Review, begun in 1756, the 
Gentleman^ s Magazine (1731), the London Maga- 
zine (1732), and Scofs Magazine (1739)- But the 
Monthly remarked that the Vicar of Wakefield had 
"defects enough to put the reader out of patience with 
an author capable of so strangely underwriting him- 
self," and as late as 1798 pronounced The Rime of 
the Ancient Mariner to be "the strangest story of 
cock and bull that we ever saw on paper," while the 
Gentleman's Magazine sagely commented upon 
Gray's immortal poem in manner following: "Elegy 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 105 

wrote in a country church-yard, 4to. Dodsley, 6d. : 
seven pages. The excellency of this little piece more 
than compensates for its lack of quantity." The Bent- 
ley edition, two years later, called forth a luminous 
comment about the "head and tail pieces with which 
each poem is adorned, which are of uncommon ex- 
cellence, the Melancholy in particular being exquisite." 
In all of them there was scarcely any literary criticism. 
The articles were furnished chiefly by dreary drudges, 
hack-writers dominated by the booksellers, receiving 
absurdly scanty pay. It is true, however, that the 
books they reviewed were scarcely less dreary than 
the reviews themselves. 

In their History of English Literature Garnett and 
Gosse say, with some justice : 

"Readers of the early numbers of the Edinburgh 
and the Quarterly will to-day be surprised at the emo- 
tion they caused and the power they wielded. They 
are often smart, sometimes witty, rarely sound, and 
the style is, as a rule, pompous and diffuse. The mod- 
ern reader is irritated by the haughty assumption of 
these boyish reviewers, who treat genius as a prisoner 
at the bar, and as in all probability a guilty prisoner. 
* * * This unjust judging of literature, and par- 
ticularly of poetry — what is called the 'slashing' style 
of criticism — when it is now revived, is usually still 
prosecuted on the lines laid down by Jeffrey and Gif- 
ford. It gives satisfaction to the reviewer, pain to the 
author, and a faint amusement to the public. It has 
no effect whatever on the ultimate position of the 
book reviewed, but, exercised on occasion, it is doubt- 
less a useful counter-irritant to thoughtless or venal 
eulogy." 

As far as the pompous style is concerned, it was not 
peculiar to the Reviews of the time: it pervaded all 



io6 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

prose literature; and when we consider the enormous 
output of books we are now familiar with, we may 
regret that their power of correction has substantially 
disappeared. 

The refinement of style for which certain of these 
magazines were distinguished is indicated by some of 
the remarks made by one about the other. The Month- 
ly said that the staff of the Critical was composed of 
"physicians without practice, authors without learning, 
men without decency, and critics without judgment." 
Smollett in the Critical declared that his Review 
at least was not conducted by "a parcel of obscene 
hirelings under the restraint of a bookseller and his 
wife, who presume to revise, alter and amend the ar- 
ticles." Mrs. Griffiths, who had literary tastes, was 
reviled as "an antiquated Sappho, or rather a Pope 
Joan in taste and literature, pregnant with abuse, begot 
by rancour, under the canopy of ignorance." 

The story of the inception of the Edinburgh in that 
little room in the house on Buccleuch Place has been 
told so often and by so many that it has become a fa- 
miliar tale. There had been an Edinburgh Review in 
1756, but it had expired after a twelvemonth life, des- 
tined to be revived under brilliant auspices — brilliant at 
least in the matter of brains, for the youthful galaxy 
composed of Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Brougham, and 
Horner well deserved to be called "brilliant." Smith's 
account of the matter was disputed by Brougham long 
years afterwards, but its correctness in the main has been 
established. The old-age reminiscences of the Chan- 
cellor were not conspicuous for accuracy and his over- 
weening sense of self-importance led him to exaggera- 
tions where his own actions were involved. Sydney 
Smith was the editor of the first number, if it may be 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 107 

said to have had a single editor, but thereafter Jeffrey 
assumed full charge. Brougham's own copy of that 
first number, with his autograph on the fly leaf, dated 
"1802," lies before me. It has the initials of the auth- 
ors marked in the index against the titles of their con- 
tributions. The two hundred and fifty-two pages of 
close print make up a large book, and I am sorry to 
say, rather a dull one. It is not easy to understand now 
why it could have aroused much interest. But on reflec- 
tion, one may comprehend that it was such an advance 
on its predecessors that it commanded instant apprecia- 
tion. According to Brougham's notes, Jeffrey had five 
articles, filling sixty-seven pages; Brougham, four, of 
forty-six pages; Hamilton four, of thirty-seven pages; 
and Horner, Smith, Macfarlan, Dr. John Thomson, 
Dr. Thomas Brown, and Murray follow with a lesser 
amount. The volume has an especial interest, for, as 
Mr. J. Rogers Rees remarks in a pencil note, "this at- 
tribution in the founder's autograph sets the question of 
the several contributors finally at rest." The inaccuracy 
of the story of the establishment of the Review which 
Brougham gives in his Memoirs^ is indicated by the 
fact that while he asserts that he himself wrote in the 
first number the reviews of "Oliver's Travels," "Bald- 
win's Egypt" (jointly with Jeffrey) and "Playf air's Il- 
lustrations of the Huttonian Theory," yet in his per- 
sonal copy of that number he has, in his own handwrit- 
ing, asserted that the first two were by Hamilton and 
the third by John Macfarlan. But he does justice to 
Jeffrey, of whom he says : 

"Jeffrey's labors as an editor were unceasing, and 
I will venture to say, if we had searched all Europe, a 
better man in every respect could not have been found. 
As a critic he was unequalled; and, take them as a 



io8 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

whole, I consider his articles were the best we had. As 
an instance of the care he took in revising and prepar- 
ing contributions, I remember an article on the Me- 
moirs of Prince Eugene was sent to Jeffrey by Mill. 
Jejfirey gave it to Dr. Ferrier, of Manchester, to re- 
vise; and when he got it back from Dr. Ferrier, he 
himself corrected it, and added the moral reflections 
and the concluding observations on the new Paris edi- 
tion of the work." 

Perhaps, in preference to the various accounts by 
Sydney Smith, Brougham, and others, one may trust 
most in Jeffrey's own story as related by him in a let- 
ter written in 1846 to Robert Chambers. Jeffrey says: 

"I cannot say exactly where the project of the Edin- 
burgh Review wast first talked of among the projec- 
tors. But the first serious conversations about it — and 
which led to our application to a publisher — were held 
in a small house, where I then lived, in Buccleuch Place 
(I forget the number). They were attended by S. 
Smith, F. Horner, Dr. Thomas Brown, Lord Mur- 
ray (John Archibald Murray, a Scottish advocate, and 
now one of the Scottish judges), and some of them 
also by Lord Webb Seymour, Dr. John Thomson, and 
Thomas Thomson. The first three numbers were 
given to the publisher — he taking the risk and defray- 
ing the charges. There was then no individual edi- 
tor, but as many of us as could be got to attend used 
to meet in a dingy room of Willison's printing-office, 
in Craig's Close, where the proofs of our own articles 
were read over and remarked upon and attempts made 
also to sit in judgment on the few manuscripts which 
were then offered by strangers. * * * Smith 
was by far the most timid of the confederacy and be- 
lieved that, if our incognito was not strictly main- 
tained, we could not go on a day, and this was his ob- 
ject for making us hold our dark divans at Willison's 
office, to which he insisted on our repairing singly, and 
by back-approaches or different lanes. He had also 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 109 

so strong an impression of Brougham's indiscretion 
and rashness, that he would not let him be a member 
of our association, though wished for by all the rest. 
He was admitted, however, after the third number, 
and did more work for us than anybody. Brown took 
offence at some alterations I had made in a trifling 
article of his in the second number, and left us thus 
early: publishing at the same time in a magazine the 
fact of his secession — a step which we all deeply re- 
gretted, and thought scarcely justified by the provoca- 
tion. Nothing of the kind occurred ever after." 

It is amusing to compare this sober and undoubtedly 
accurate story with Sydney Smith's, and with Broug- 
ham's bumptious narrative, — accusing Jeffrey of timid- 
ity — from which one would suppose that Brougham was 
the mainstay of the enterprise and the others were 
satellites, content to follow his lead. 

Jeffrey continued to occupy the chair until 1829, and 
under his management the circulation of the Review 
increased from seven hundred and eighty-nine to nearly 
thirteen thousand copies. Sir Walter Scott ascribed its 
success mainly to two circumstances, — that it was en- 
tirely uninfluenced by the booksellers and that the editor 
and contributors were regularly paid. The editor re- 
ceived at first £300 a year, afterwards £800 a year; 
and every contributor, rich or poor, was compelled to 
accept a minimum sum of £10 a sheet, afterwards in- 
creased to £16. Griffiths paid two guineas a sheet of 
sixteen pages, and his writers earned their money by 
giving about eight pages of quotation to one page of 
criticism; so that the Edinburgh was not especially gen- 
erous, at first. Sir Walter's reasons may have been 
good, but perhaps the style and the merit of the con- 
tents and the growing demand of readers for the best 



no EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

work had a good deal to do with the prosperity of the 
periodical. 

The young man of twenty-nine who thus entered 
upon his career as a famous critic and a great editor, 
was the eldest son of George Jeffrey, a Depute Clerk 
of the Court of Session, and Henrietta Louden, his 
wife. His mother was a daughter of John Louden, 
a farmer living near Lanark. There were four other 
children of this marriage : Margaret, who died 
young; Mary, who married George Napier, a writer 
to the signet, on April 21, 1797; John, who went to 
Boston, Massachusetts, engaged in business as a mer- 
chant with his father's brother, and married a sister 
of John Wilkes; and Marion, who married in June, 
1806, Dr. Thomas Brown, a physician in Glasgow, 
and who died in 1846. Francis was born in St. 
Charles Street, St. George's Square, Edinburgh, on 
October 23, 1773. His father is described as "a high 
Tory," "sensible and respectable, but of a gloomy 
temper." The mother, greatly beloved "the more so 
from the contrast betw^een her and her husband," died 
when Francis was only thirteen years old. The boy 
learned dancing before he was nine, loved study 
better than play, and was never good at any bodily 
exercise except walking. He entered the High School 
at Edinburgh in October, 178 1, remaining there until 
1787. Mr. Eraser, of the School, who was the in- 
structor of both Scott and Brougham, and who was 
Jeffrey's preceptor for four years, — until the youth 
passed under the sway of Alexander Adam, the rector, 
— remembered him as a "little, clever, anxious boy, al- 
ways near the top of his class, and who never lost a 
place without shedding tears." He was at Glasgow 
College during the next two years, his brightness be- 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER iii 

coming manifest, but his father would not permit him 
to attend the lectures of Professor Millar, a Whig. 
He occupied himself much in the work of composition, 
and even proposed to Adam to conduct a philosophi-. 
cal correspondence. Returning to Edinburgh in 1789, 
he attended the law lectures of Hume and Dick, and 
was fortunate enough to be able to avail of the privi- 
leges of the excellent library of his uncle, William 
Morehead, who lived at Herbertshire, Stirling. In 
September, 1791, he entered Queen's College, Ox- 
ford, where he remained, greatly discontented, until 
July, 1792. In the dreary and disappointing bio- 
grapy which Lord Cockburn published in 1852, there 
are a number of quotations from his letters to mem- 
bers of his family betraying his dissatisfaction with 
the conditions then prevailing in Oxford. An unpub- 
lished letter to his sister Mary, written in April, 1792, 
is in my possession. It is pleasantly chatty and play- 
ful, foreshadowing the diffuseness and discursiveness 
of his later style, and the handwriting is abominable. 
"Oh, ma soeury he begins, referring to a portrait 
which she had given him, "how much I am obliged to 
you — and the readiness of your compliance has doubled 
its value, and the elegance of the execution has multi- 
plied it seven fold. It has restored the image to my 
soul and given a foundation of accuracy and reality 
to the lawless embellishments of fancy." He criti- 
cises the portrait in a manner which reminds us of his 
later reviews, and then wanders to the subject of 
woman. He expresses doubts about the truth of a 
report concerning one of his sister's friends. "I have 
many admirable reasons," he says, "for my disbelief 
— among the rest, first, because so many of the same 
family have imposed upon the world of late that it 



112 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

would be absurd to depend upon the veracity of this, 
and secondly because I am very unwilling to suppose 
that it should be so tho' how and why I am unwilling 
it may not be so easy to explain. I don't know that I 
ever was exactly what can be called in love with this 
fair coquette, and am certain there never was anything 
serious in my attachment to her, for her idea was so 
closely associated with images of laughter and vivac- 
ity that I could never conjure up her beauties but they 
appeared gilded with smiles and banished all the lan- 
guishments of meditating and melting affection which 
I take to be the only basis and indication of love — but 
this is letting you into the very mysteries of the science, 
— but perpend — at the same time her idea is entire 
in my fancy — her image is enshrined in my heart, and 
I shall be horribly tempted to wish that this (illegible) 
may dance off in an apoplexy the night preceding his 
espousals if I hear anything more about him; how- 
ever, I did not dedicate one tear to the probability." 
After this sage dissertation on love from a lad of 
nineteen, he proceeds to more serious subjects. "I be- 
gin to find that the company with which I am most 
probably destined to labor along the journey of life is 
not accommodated to my taste and disposition. It 
seems to be composed of men of moderate futures 
and moderate wishes and abilities and passions, and 
virtues and vices. Men who do not think it hard to 
toil and bustle like Mr. Paterson in his printing gar- 
ret all day so they can have a comfortable supper and 
a tiff of punch after it at night; men who talk very 
sagely of the comforts of such a supper, who are easily 
induced to forgive any fraud to which a brother has 
been tempted, in the hope of it; men in whom busi- 
ness has extinguished sensation and whose wishes are 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 113 

bounded with the certainty of living respectably and 
comfortably among their neighbors. Now this sort 
of life and this sort of character is exactly what I de- 
test and avoid. If it were not given to me to ascend 
the towering steep of glory I should wish to descend 
into the low and the verdant vale of obscurity and 
peace — there to seek enjoyment from the practice of 
benevolence, from the sublimities of meditation, the 
gratification of taste, and the sweet simplicity of inter- 
course which softens the ruggedness of retirement. 
But in this heedless society of indifference and imper- 
tmence where a man never sees the heart of his com- 
panion, where his time is occupied in laboring out 
some superfluous luxury to be sparkled in the eyes of 
those from whose gratification he can have no pleas- 
ure, where no reward or recompence is offered to his 
hopes for the continued torture of a silly and turbu- 
lent crowd. In this meddling, busy region of exist- 
ence I question if it be possible for happiness to find 
footing, and if we hear few complaints of the misery 
of its inhabitants, it is only because their sensations 
have been so totally destroyed that they have no no- 
tion or idea of the good they never knew. I am de- 
termined to make an exertion to get out of this crowd. 
* * * Cara, I have sent you quite a declamation, 
but such are the subjects which occupy me at present, 
and there is not a single soul here to whom they would 
be intelligible. The insipid and vulgarly social char- 
acter is more universal than I had believed. I have 
found it conjoined with learning and mathematics, 
and pride, and even with taste and sane feeling." All 
of this is quite characteristic of a lively boy with a 
vocabulary too overflowing to be completely under 
control, and it is amusing to find him at the close, 



114 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

straying back from the "regions of existence" to the 
young woman about whose prospective nuptials he 
was so much disturbed. *'I lay my commands upon 
you to write me a long letter about this fair girl. If 
she Is within hearing, tell her as much of my senti- 
ments of her as you think consistent with my polite- 
ness/^ It all shows that college lads remain about the 
same from generation to generation. We may not 
find so much fertility of phrase In the letters of the 
boys of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, to their loving 
sisters; but It is generally the life one is to lead, the 
unsympathetic surroundings, and the eternal feminine. 
Although disappointed with Oxford, he studied 
diligently and wrote persistently, one of his papers 
being an essay on "Beauty," which was "the germ of 
his treatise on that subject in the Encyclopaedia Britan- 
nica/' One thing he strove for, which seems to us 
scarcely worth while : he tried to lose his Scotch dialect 
and accent, but did not entirely succeed. Lord Cock- 
burn says that he was "by no means so successful in 
acquiring an English voice. * * * What he picked 
up was a high-keyed accent and a sharp pronuncia- 
tion;" and the solemn biographer adds that "the acqui- 
sition of a pure English accent by a full grown Scotch- 
man Is fortunately impossible." He resumed his at- 
tendance on law lectures in Edinburgh, and was admit- 
ted to practice on December i6, 1794. He had so 
busied himself In writing and speaking, and in the de- 
bates of the famous Speculative Society, which he joined 
in 1792 and where he encountered Scott, Brougham, 
Petty, Horner, and Henry Cockburn, that he had little 
or no time to build up a business, and in 1801 he told 
his brother that his profession had never yet brought 
him £100 a year. While at Oxford he had fancied 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 115 

that he might become famous as a poet; he wrote to 
his sister that he should "never be a great man, unless 
it be as a poet." So besides his essays, he wrote much 
verse; contemplated, in 1796, a translation in the style 
of Cowper's Homer, from the Argonautics of Apol- 
lonius; and composed two plays, never given to the 
world. Cockburn tells us that he once left a manu- 
script poem with a publisher, but after reflection, suc- 
ceeded in rescuing it before it was considered. 

II. 

\The young lawyer in search of a practice should be 
an object of commiseration. It is all so much a mat- 
ter of chance that he is apt to be sadly discouraged at 
the outset in his quest of clients. Brains count, it is 
true, but brains must come into contact with opportu- 
nity to achieve success, and the time when the conjunc- 
tion is to occur, if it is to occur at all, seems often 
remote and the waiting is tedious and exasperating. It 
may never come, and the failure leaves the victim in 
depression and penury. In any event, the aspirant 
experiences a long discouragement, and is again and 
agam on the point of abandoning his profession. Jeff- 
rey was no exception to the rule. He was a Whig, and 
in 1793 had written an essay on "Politicks" giving ex- 
pression to views which sorely displeased his Tory 
father, but he was encouraged by his uncle Morehead 
whqr^was inclined to liberalism. In that day Scotland 
was ruled by the Tories under Henry Dundas and later 
under Melville, and there was little chance for Jeffrey, 
although he had a small business by reason of some 
family connections. He betook himself to London in 
1798, taking letters to editors, including Perry of the 



ii6 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"Morning Chronicle," with the notion that he could 
do far better in literature than in law, but it came to 
nothing and back he went to study science, especially 
chemistry. He joined a society, the "Academy of 
Physicks," in company with Brown, Brougham and 
Horner, and had serious thoughts of trying his fortune 
in India. His friends suggested that he should aspire 
to fill the chair of history in the University of Edin- 
burgh, which A. F. Tytler had just resigned, but his 
political principles stood in his way. In 1801 he was 
a candidate for a reportership in the Court of Sessions, 
but was defeated. So, having no prospects to speak 
of and barely twenty guineas to his name, he prudently 
married his second cousin, Catherine Wilson, on No- 
vember I, 1 801, and went to live in that "flat" on 
Buccleuch Place, which was to attain immortality as 
the birthplace of the Edinburgh. Sydney Smith speaks 
of it as being in the "eighth or ninth story," but it was 
really in the third; and there he dwelt until May, 1802, 
when he removed to the upper story of No. 62 Queen 
Street. It is recorded that it cost him £7-18 to furnish 
his study, £13-8 for his dining room, and £22-19 ^^^ 
his drawing room. Almost ready to look for employ- 
ment in other fields, he found his opportunity in the 
Review. 

-In the first four numbers of the Edinburgh, Jeffrey 
had sixteen articles and Sydney Smith eighteen; in 
the first twenty-four numbers he had seventy-five. Smith 
twenty-three, and Brougham eighty. In the first num- 
ber, that of October, 1802, he reviewed Southey's 
Thalaba, and to a reader of to-day his conclusions ap- 
pear to be well-founded. His judgment was severe but 
not savagely fierce. He says with justice that "all the 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 117 

productions of this author, it appears to us, bear very 
distinctly the impression of an amiable mind, a culti- 
vated fancy, and a perverted taste." But the review 
is important chiefly from the evidence it affords of the 
writer's hostility to the rising school of poetry, that 
of Wordsworth and his friends — a hostility which sur- 
vived even the ultimate victory of the new school over 
the old and classical formality of its predecessors. The 
spirit in which he approached the subject is indicated 
by the opening sentence: "Poetry has this much, at 
least, in common with religion, that its standards were 
fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose author- 
ity it is no longer lawful to call in question." This 
positive assertion of his proposition is an example of 
what has been assailed as the dictatorial, ex cathedra 
method which prevailed in the Edinburgh for years and 
which reached perhaps its ultimate development in the 
brilliant, often unfair, but always fascinating essays 
of Macaulay. 

A vast amount of nonsense has been uttered con- 
cerning Jeffrey's arbitrary manner and his errors with 
regard to the works of the new poets. One of the most 
common texts for the sermons of those discerning critics 
who are so extremely wise after the fact, is the famous 
"This will never do," with which he opened his review 
of The Excursion. "But has it ever done?" asks Pro- 
fessor Minto; "I have never heard of or seen anybody 
prepared to say that ^he Excursion can be read with 
unflagging delight. * * * Xhe truth is that most 
of his [Jeffrey's] criticism has been amply confirmed 
and justified." A pretentious and "cock-sure" writer in 
a modern "History of English Literature" so-called, 
affords an illustration of the very quality of autocratic 
judgment which he ascribes to Jeffrey, when he says: — 



ii8 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"The ministerial pronouncements of its arch-critic^ 
Jeffrey, are such as now can only amaze. Amid the 
great constellation of poets who had come within 
his knowledge as a critic — Byron, Moore, Words- 
worth, Coleridge, Crabbe, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson 
— he discovered permanent qualities in two only, Ro- 
gers and Campbell. He describes Wilhelm Meister 
without circumlocution as 'so much trash'. In fact he 
represents orthodox opinion of the day in stylish cir- 
cles, elevated only to the extent of being expressed 
with exceptional point." 

This writer sees fit to leave wholly out of view Burns 
and Scott and the laudatory reviews of the Reliques 
of Robert Burns In January, 1809, and of The Lady 
of the Lake In August, 18 10. Tennyson's "Poems, 
Chiefly Lyrical" did not appear until a year after Jeff- 
rey resigned the editorial chair. As to Keats, he over- 
looks the appreciative review of Endymion, which ap- 
peared In the Edinburgh In 1820, long after the publi- 
cation of the cruel and excoriating criticism which dis- 
figured the pages of the Quarterly In April, 18 18. 

In a note to the review of Endymion, which I cite 
from the volumes of collected papers (11, 373; Edition 
of 1846), Jeffrey says: 

"I still think that a poet of great power and prom- 
ise was lost to us by the premature death of Keats 
* * * and regret that I did not go more largely 
into the exposition of his merits, in the slight notice 
of them which I now venture to reprint. But though 
I cannot, with propriety, or without departing from 
the principle which must govern this republication, 
now supply the omission, I hope to be forgiven for 
having added a page or two to the citations — by which 
my opinion of those merits was then Illustrated and is 
again left to the judgment of the reader." 

As far as Wilhelm Meister Is concerned, I am not 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 119 

sure that he was wrong. It seems to be an unwarranted 
assertion that Jeffrey merely represented "the ortho- 
dox opinion of the day in stylish circles" — a causeless 
sneer at a supposed deference to the views of "stylish 
circles," which somewhat vulgar phrase is evidently 
used to designate the aristocracy of culture and of so- 
cial position. It is needless to devise such a puerile 
theory. Jeffrey was a trained and accomplished law- 
yer; and like most lawyers of his type, he was disposed 
to find everywhere a law, a rule, whether of civil con- 
duct prescribed by the supreme power of a state, or of 
good taste prescribed by those whose decisions, re- 
spected and followed in the past, had come to possess 
in their own realm the binding force of law. Men of 
his profession are almost always conservative, often to 
excess, over-reluctant to countenance changes which 
may be advantageous and which moreover are inevita- 
ble; for all laws must change with the spirit and the 
temper of the times. 

In fact, however, this sapient scribbler borrowed 
his judgment from Sir Leslie Stephen's charming es- 
say, "The First Edinburgh Reviewers,"* which is full 
of that delightful and easy book-discussion so fascin- 
ating to a reader who enjoys literary criticism. Ste- 
phen was, in that essay, a little, if ever so little, severe 
with Jeffrey, and his article on Jeffrey in the National 
Dictionary of Biography is much more favorable in 
its tone. Stephen says of him in the essay: "Every critic 
has a sacred and inalienable right to blunder at times; 
but Jeffrey's blundering is amazingly systematic and 
comprehensive." He illustrates this by a quotation 
from the last of Jeffrey's poetical critiques (October, 



* 



Hours in a Library, il, 241 (1894). 



120 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

1829) where the reviewer, he says, sums up his criti- 
cal experience. "He doubts whether Mrs. Hemans, 
whom he is reviewing at the time, will be immortaL 
'The tuneful quartos of Southey,' he says, 'are al- 
ready little better than lumber,' and the rich melodies 
of Keats and Shelley, and the fantastical emphasis of 
Wordsworth, and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are 
melting fast from the field of vision. The novels of 
Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid 
strains of Moore are fading into distance and dim- 
ness, except when they have been married to immor- 
tal music; and the blazing star of Byron himself is 
receding from its place of pride." This does not im- 
press one as a monument of error. Surely every word 
of it is as true to-day as it was in 1829, except that 
there has been a recrudescence of "the rich melodies 
of Keats and Shelley," and of Byron, whose star was 
assuredly almost obscured for many years, although 
of late it seems to be again shining with a good deal 
of its former lustre. The gravamen of the charge 
of blundering which is preferred against Jeffrey is, to 
use the words of Sir Leslie Stephen, his assertion 
that "the two who show least marks of decay are— of 
all people in the world — Rogers and Campbell!" 
Let us reason together a little about this censure. 

Every lawyer knows that in dealing with what a 
man says, it is important to know exactly what he said. 
What was it that Jeffrey said about Rogers and 
Campbell which has brought down upon him the ava- 
lanche of blame showered by Stephen and Scrib- 
bler? Dr. Winchester says that it has been "quoted 
by everybody who has written anything on Jeffrey 
since Christopher North quoted it first in Blackwood,** 
The trouble is that everybody does not quote it; almost 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 121 

everybody attempts to paraphrase it and blunders in the 
attempt. This is exactly what Jeffrey wrote : — 

''The two who have the longest withstood this rapid 
withering of the laurel, and with the least mark of 
decay on their branches, are Rogers and Campbell; 
neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous writ- 
ers, and both distinguished rather for their fine taste 
and consummate elegance of their writings, than for 
that fiery passion, and disdainful vehemence which 
seemed for a time to be so much more in favor with the 
public." 

It may be permitted to say that in 1829 this was 
all quite true ; no one has denied it. It is very far from 
an assertion that Rogers and Campbell will be "the 
sole enduring relics from an age of Wordsworth, 
Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Byron." Jeffrey says 
not a word about what may happen in the future. Sir 
Leslie appears to have had a slight degree of com- 
punction about his conclusion, because he attempts to 
sustain his severity by the remark that "this summary 
was republished in 1843, by which time the true pro- 
portions of the great reputations of the period were 
becoming more obvious to an ordinary observer." 
But Jeffrey was not writing in 1843; ^^ was simply 
repeating what he wrote in 1829. Would Sir Leslie 
have had him change it? His principle in the repro- 
duction is referred to in the note about Keats, hereto- 
fore quoted. In the well-known words of Jeffrey, 
"This will never do." It must be remembered, too, 
that Rogers was a dearly beloved friend, and critics 
are human; and I dare to say that there are even now 
verses of Campbell which are familiar to thousands 
who do not know a line of Keats or of Shelley. More- 
over, if the modest statement of his views was a 



122 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

blunder, we must remember what Sir Leslie well says, 
"criticism is a still more perishable commodity than 
poetry," and if you censure one critic for an occa- 
sional error, you will have to condemn them all. 
Stephen does admit in a letter to Mrs. Jackson, in 
1877, that "Jeffrey, too, said a true thing or two 
about Wordsworth." But was Sir Leslie, after all, a 
very competent judge ? His biographer, Mr. Maitland, 
in Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1906) says: 

"Stephen, we are told, after his death, did not 

really care for poetry any more than Jeffrey, and 

consequently was not fully qualified to criticise it. Of 
course not; he was a philosopher." 

Hence we may distrust the capacity of Stephen to 
decide about Jeffrey's views of poetry. The devoted 
admirers of Wordsworth never quite forgave Jeffrey 
for what he said about their idol. Crabbe Robinson 
records in his Diary a talk with Empson, in which 
the latter relates that Jeffrey had lately told him that 
so many people had thought highly of Wordsworth, 
that he was resolved to reperuse his poems and see if 
he had anything to retract. He found nothing to re- 
tract except, perhaps, a contemptuous and flippant 
phrase or two. Empson believed that Jeffrey's dis- 
taste for Wordsworth was honest, — mere uncongenial- 
ity of mind. Jeffrey did acknowledge that he was 
wrong in his treatment of Lamb. Robinson notes, in 
April, 1835, ^^s meeting Jeffrey at dinner. "Jeffrey," 
he says, "is a sharp and clever-looking man, and in 
spite of my dislike to his name, he did not on the 
whole displease me. His treatment of Wordsworth 
would not allow me to like him, had he been greater 
by far than he was. And, therefore, when he said. 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 123 

*I was always an admirer of Wordsworth/ I could not 
repress the unseemly remark, 'You had a singular 
way of showing your admiration'."* 

In the Thalaha review, Jeffrey vigorously attacks 
the "affectation of great simplicity and familiarity of 
language," which was characteristic of the new school 
of poets; "the perverted taste for simplicity" he calls 
it. He seems to have been fond of the expression 
"perverted taste." He is moved to bitter words when 
he refers to their "splenetic and idle discontent with 
the existing institutions of society." His own feel- 
ings were so far "aristocratic" that he was unable to 
believe that while the princely and the wealthy are to 
be strongly condemned for acts of vice and profligacy, 
the members of "the lower orders of society" are to 
be excused and pitied for like acts, because they are 
"but the helpless victims or instruments" of the dis- 
orders attending the vicious constitution of society. 
He is guilty of such offensive and unpopular sugges- 
tions as that "the same apology ought certainly to be 
admitted for the wealthy, as for the needy offender. 
They are subject alike to the overruling influence of 
necessity, and equally affected by the miserable condi- 
tion of society. If it be natural for a poor man to 
murder and rob in order to make himself comfort- 
able, it is no less natural for a rich man to gorman- 
dise and domineer, in order to have the full use of his 
riches. Wealth is just as valid an excuse for the one 
class of vices as indigence is for the other." Such 
sentiments, if uttered in these times of ours, would 
surely subject the offender to the scornful rebukes of 
our modern philosophers of the press, who regard it 

*Diary, iil, 65. 



124 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

as criminal to be rich — unless the fortune was ac- 
quired by printing newspapers, or was inherited by 
an editor, and whose denunciations of large fortunes 
are accompanied by abject deference to the possessors 
of them when in their personal presence. 

The review of The Reliques of Robert Burns (Janu- 
ary, 1809) is a fine example of the discriminating power 
of the critic. Scotchman as he was, Burns was for him 
no fetish to be adored blindly, whose every verse was 
to be raved about because the poet was a genius. He 
did not belong to that class of men who cannot believe 
that Shakespeare or Milton were ever dull; or that 
there are lines in the Holy Scriptures which might 
well be blotted out; or that George Washington never 
did a foolish thing or Benedict Arnold a good one. He 
recognized the truth that even the great have their 
failings, as they must have, being human; all the more 
lovable, more honorable perhaps for having them. 
After the usual introductory essay of the day, treating 
of the relative advantages of great culture and of hum- 
ble beginnings in the making of a true poet, and arri- 
ving at the conclusion that such a poet may well be un- 
encumbered by "the pretended helps of extended study 
and literary society," he calls attention to the harshness 
and acrimony of Burns's invective, his want of polish 
or at least of respectfulness in the general tone of his 
gallantry, his contempt or affectation of contempt for 
prudence, decency, and regularity; his frequent mistake 
of mere exaggeration and violence for force and sub- 
limity; and then he says: 

"With the allowances and exceptions we have now 
stated, we think Burns entitled to the rank of a great 
and original genius. He has in all his compositions 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 125 

great force of conception; and great spirit and anima- 
tion in its expression. He has taken a large range 
through the region of Fancy and naturalized himself 
in almost all her climates. He has great humor — 
great powers of description — great pathos — and great 
discrimination of character. Almost everything that 
he says has spirit and originality; and everything that 
he says well, is characterized by a charming facility, 
which gives a grace even to occasional rudeness, and 
communicates to the reader a delightful sympathy 
with the spontaneous soaring and conscious inspiration 
of the poet." 

What he wrote of The Lady of the Lake in the num- 
ber for August, 1 8 10, shows his capacity of estimating 
the real value of popular works, uninfluenced by per- 
sonal friendship or by the voice of the multitude. He 
gives a careful study of the elements of popularity in 
poetry, and finds the great secret of Scott's popularity 
and the leading characteristic of his poetry to consist 
"in this, that he has made more use of common topics, 
images, and expressions than any original poet of later 
times ; and, at the same time, displayed more genius and 
originality than any recent author who has worked in 
the same materials. By the latter peculiarity, he has 
entitled himself to the admiration of every description 
of readers; — by the former he is recommended in an 
especial manner to the inexperienced — at the hazard of 
some little offence to the more cultivated and fastid- 
ious." He says further: 

"There is nothing, in Mr. Scott, of the severe and 
majestic style of Milton— or of the terse and fine com- 
position of Pope, — or of the elaborate elegance and 
melody of Campbell,— or even of the flowing and 
redundant diction of Southey. But there is a medley 
of bright images and glowing words, set carelessly 



126 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

and loosely together — a diction, tinged successively 
with the careless richness of Shakespeare, the harsh- 
ness and antique simplicity of the old romances, the 
homeliness of vulgar ballads and anecdotes, and the 
sentimental glitter of the most modern poetry— pass- 
ing from the borders of the ludicrous to those of the 
sublime — alternately minute and energetic — sometimes 
artificial, and frequently negligent — but always full 
of spirit and vivacity — abounding in images that are 
striking, at first sight, to minds of every contexture — 
and never expressing a sentiment which it can cost the 
most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend." 

Jeffrey praises Scott's vivifying spirit of strength and 
animation; his ease of production; his singular talent 
for description and "especially for the description of 
scenes abounding in motion or action of any kind"; the 
manner in which "with a few bold and abrupt strokes 
he finishes a most spirited outline, and then instantly 
kindles it by the sudden light and color of some moral 
affection;" the "air of freedom and nature which he 
has contrived to impart to most of his distinguished 
characters, and with which no poet more modern than 
Shakespeare has ventured to represent persons of such 
dignity." At the same time, he remarks that Scott has 
"dazzled the reader with the splendor, and even 
warmed him with the transient heat of various affec- 
tions; but he has nowhere fairly kindled him with en- 
thusiasm, or melted him into tenderness;" and he thinks 
it quite obvious that "Mr. Scott has not aimed at writ- 
ing either in a pure or a very consistent style." 

He had not written of Marmion so approvingly, al- 
though it was brought out by Constable, who was pub- 
lishing the Edinburgh. It is said that Jeffrey rather 
characteristically sent the article to Scott with a note 
saying that he was coming to dinner on the following 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 127 

Tuesday. Scott felt the sting of the review, but tried 
to hide his feelings. Mrs. Scott, however, was but 
frigidly polite, and as Jeffrey was taking leave forgot 
even her cold politeness, saying in her broken English: 

''Well, guid night, Mr. Jeffrey; dey tell me you 
have abused Scott in the Review; and I hope Mr. 
Constable has paid you well for writing it." 

These quotations have been given partly to afford a 
glimpse of Jeffrey when he was at his best and partly 
to refute the assumption that he was always finding 
fault and wounding the feelings of authors. He had, 
it is true, some very decided views about poetry, which 
in those earlier days of the nineteenth century was a 
serious matter. People read the galloping verses of 
Scott then as eagerly as in later times they devoured 
novels. But "suddenly and without any warning," as 
Besant says, "the people of Great Britain left off read- 
ing poetry." It must be observed that both of the 
poets so favorably regarded by Jeffrey were Scotchmen 
like himself; when he came to deal with Englishmen 
he was possibly open to the charge of undue severity. 
Yet Southey was not much vexed by the review of 
Thalaba. He called it "dishonest" in some of its asser- 
tions, and justly remarks that the first part, evidently 
an answer to Wordsworth's Preface to the second edi- 
tion of the Lyrical Ballads, is utterly irrelevant to 
Thalaba, "The review altogether is a good one," he 
writes to a friend, and adds, with regard to some of 
the adverse criticism, "when any Scotchman's book 
shall come to be reviewed, then see what the Edinburgh 
critics will say." A review of Madoc was published 
in the number for October, 1805; it was both severe 



128 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

and complimentary. It was sent to Southey before it 
appeared, and Jeffrey wrote to Horner: 

"Southey is to be here to-day with P. Elmsley. I 
mean to let him read my review of Madoc before I 
put myself in the way of meeting with him. He is 
too much a man of the world, I believe, in spite of 
his poesy, to decline seeing me, whatever he may think 
of the critic." 

They did meet, and Southey wrote to Will Taylor, 
on October 22, 1805 : 

"I have seen Jeffrey, etc. I met him in good hu- 
mor, being by God's blessing, of a happy temper. 
Having seen him, it would be impossible to be angry 
at anything so diminutive. We talked upon the ques- 
tion of taste, on which we are at issue; he is a mere 
child upon that subject. I never met with a man who 
was so easy to checkmate." 

Southey evidently felt the censure more keenly than 
he would have been willing to confess. As Cockburn 
says: 

"Jeffrey's being a child in taste, and easily check- 
mated in discussion will probably strike those who 
knew him as novelties in his character." 

The fact that if Jeffrey made any mistake in the 
review of Madoc, it was in lauding the poem too high- 
ly. It was one of poor Southey's stupendous failures. 

Dr. Winchester thinks that Jeffrey's criticism "has 
always a certain hard common-sense. It Is clear and 
sane, level to the comprehension of everybody. There 
is nothing subtle in it. He never goes much below the 
surface." The learned essayist then calls Jeffrey dog- 
matic and superficial, and says that he was unable to 
apply any historical method in criticism; inconsistent, 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 129 

with taste narrowed In its range on the one side by that 
hard common sense of his, and on the other by ''a 
rather prim sentimentaHty." Dr. Winchester seems 
disposed to find fault with Jeffrey because in the first 
quarter of the nineteenth century he did not write in 
the manner of the first decade of the twentieth. But 
it is not easy to understand why he should accuse Jeff- 
rey of ignoring Keats because "the Edinburgh had no 
word of recognition for him, and only broke silence 
In 1820, when his brief career was closed." The article 
appeared in August, 1820, and Keats died in his twenty- 
sixth year, in February, 1821 ; so that the delay was not 
extraordinary. Endymion first appeared in 18 18 and 
attracted little attention at the time. The "Lamia, 
Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and other Poems," 
which was the immediate occasion of the review, was 
published early in July, 1820. So that to the ordinary 
mind it appears that one must be extremely anxious to 
find fault who would censure Jeffrey for neglecting 
Keats. 

In my boyhood. Chambers' Cyclopaedia of Eng- 
lish Literature was regarded as a trustworthy guide, 
and I am disposed to believe that it deserved its reputa- 
tion. Its verdict upon Jeffrey bears the impress of fair- 
ness and candor. "There is some ground," says the im- 
partial writer who has manifestly no desire to be 
"smart" or censorious, "for charging upon the Edin- 
burgh Review, in its earlier career, an absence of proper 
respect and enthusiasm for the works of living genius. 
Where no prepossession of the kind intervened, Jeffrey 
was an admirable critic. If he was not profound, he 
was interesting and graceful. His dissertations on the 
works of Cowper, Crabbe, Byron, Scott, and Campbell, 
and on the earlier and greater lights of our poetry, as 



130 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

well as those on moral science, national manners, and 
views of actual life, are expressed with great eloquence 
and originality, and in a fine spirit of humanity. His 
powers of perception and analysis were quick, subtle 
and penetrating, and withal comprehensive; while his 
brilliant imagination invested subjects that in ordinary 
hands would have been dry and uninviting, with strong 
interest and attraction. He seldom gave full scope to 
his feelings and sympathies, but they occasionally broke 
forth with inimitable effect and kindled up the pages 
of his criticism." 

The same writer, later on, observes with much 
force, that "as a literary critic, we may advert to the 
singular taste and judgment with Lord Jeffrey exer- 
cised in making selections from the works he reviewed, 
and interweaving them, as it were, with the text of 
his criticism. Whatever was picturesque, solemn, pa- 
thetic, or sublime, caught his eye, and was thus intro- 
duced to a new and vastly extended circle of readers, 
besides furnishing matter for various collections of 
extracts and innumerable school exercises. The chief 
defect of his writing is the occasional diffuseness and 
carelessness of his style. He wrote as he spoke, with 
great rapidity and with a flood of illustration." I 
am not sure that an author who "writes as he speaks" 
is not, after all, as satisfactory as one who observes 
the law of reticence with severity and strictness. Surely 
his work is readable, and as the eye runs rapidly over 
the printed page, no time is wasted. The colloquial 
style is, however, not favored by every reader. Many 
prefer that their mental pabulum should be supplied 
in condensed tablets, and prefer the concise, the epi- 
grammatic method. 

Some remarks of Jeffrey, in his review of Camp- 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 131 

bell's Specimens of the British Poets (18 19), Impress 
me as significant of his methods of judgment. He 
says : 

"As the materials of enjoyment and Instruction ac- 
cumulate around us, more and more, we fear, must 
thus be daily rejected and left to waste. For while 
our tasks lengthen, our lives remain as short as ever; 
and the calls on our time multiply, while our time 
itself is flying swiftly away. This superfluity and 
abundance of our treasures, therefore, necessarily ren- 
der much of them worthless; and the veriest accidents 
may. In such a case, determine what part shall be pre- 
served, and what thrown away and neglected. When 
an army Is decimated, the very bravest may fall; and 
many poets, worthy of eternal remembrance, have 
probably been forgotten, merely because there was not 
room in our memories for all." 

And looking forward to 19 19, he says: 

"Our living poets will then be nearly as old as 
Pope and Swift are at present, — but there will 
stand between them and that generation nearly ten 
times as much fresh and fashionable poetry as Is now 
Interposed between us and those writers; — and if 
Scott and Byron and Campbell have already cast Pope 
and Swift a good deal into the shade. In what form 
and dimensions are they themselves likely to be pre- 
sented In the eyes of our great grandchildren? The 
thought, we own. Is a little appalling; — and we con- 
fess we see nothing better to Imagine than that they 
may find a comfortable place in some new collection 
of specimens — the centenary of the present publica- 
tion. There — If the future editor have anything like 
the Indulgence and veneration for antiquity of his 
predecessor — there shall posterity still hang with 
rapture on the half of Campbell, — and the fourth part 
of Byron, — and the sixth of Scott, — and the scattered 
tythes of Crabbe, — and the three per cent, of Southey, 
— while some good-natured critic shall sit in our 



132 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

mouldering chair, and more than half prefer them to 
those by whom they have been superseded! — It is an 
hyperbole of good-nature, however, we fear, to as- 
cribe to them even those dimensions at the end of a cen- 
tury. After a lapse of two hundred and fifty years, we 
are afraid to think of the space they may have shrunk 
into. We have no Shakespeare, alas! to shed a never- 
setting light on his contemporaries! — and if we con- 
tinue to write and rhyme at the present rate for two 
hundred years longer, there must be some new art of 
short-hand reading invented, — or all reading will be 
given up in despair." 

The error he made was in supposing that in the 
twentieth century, poetry would be a matter of inter- 
est to the general reader. We know that nobody cares 
much now for poetry; it has ceased to be a subject of 
concern to any but the few; if it is read at all, it is only 
by the student of literature, for the multitude of men 
find their food for thought in science, sociology and 
fiction. The man at the club would stare in hopeless 
surprise at any reference to Pope, or Crabbe, or even 
Campbell, modern as he is, and say to himself that his 
interlocutor was a queer old antediluvian, and a mere 
burrower in the rubbish of long ago. 

Naturally Jeffrey, as the responsible editor, was 
compelled sometimes to suffer vicariously for the of- 
fense of others. Everyone knows the biting review 
of "Hours of Idleness," which Brougham wrote for 
the number of January, 1808, and how Byron fumed 
furiously in the somewhat labored satire of "English 
Bards and Scottish Reviewers," pouring forth his 
vitriolic wrath upon Jeffrey in particular. But Byron 
repented of his assault when in later years he came 
to know the worth of the man he libelled. He had 
said: 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 133 

"Believe a woman or an epitaph, 
Or any other thing that's false, before 
You trust in critics, who themselves are sore; 
Or yield one single thought to be misled 
By Jeffrey's heart or Lambe's Boeotian head." 

In 18 16 he wrote: 

"This was not just. Neither the heart nor the head 
of these gentlemen are at all what they are here rep- 
resented. At the time this was written, I was per- 
sonally not acquainted with either." 

Later in the satire he exclaimed: 

"Health to immortal Jeffrey! once in name 
England could boast a judge almost the same !" 

To compare Jeffrey with Jeffreys seems to have 
been a favorite occupation of wounded authors in 
those days: each one appeared to think that his con- 
ceit was original. Byron goes on to give vent to a 
tirade somewhat tedious, in the course of which he 
makes much of the Moore duel, described later on. 
But in his Diary (18 14) he recorded his recantation. 
"I have often," he says, "since my return to Eng- 
land, heard Jeffrey most highly commended by those 
who knew him, for things independent of his talents. 
I admired him for this — not because he has praised 
me, but because he is, perhaps, the only man who, un- 
der the relations in which he and I stand or stood with 
regard to each other, would have had the liberality to 
act thus: none but a great soul dared hazard It — a 
little scribbler would have gone on cavilling to the end 
of the chapter." Jeffrey, In 18 12, reviewing the first 
and second cantos of Childe Harold, had referred to 
the scurrilous stings of the satire by saying that "per- 
sonalities so outrageous were only injurious to their 



134 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

author.'* Byron tried to make amends in the tenth 
canto of Don Juan by saying: 

"And all our little feuds, at least all miney 
Dear Jeffrey, once my most redoubted foe 

(As far as rhyme and criticism combine 
To make such puppets of us things below,) 

Are over; Here's a health to 'Auld Lang Syne!' 
I do not know you, and may never know 

Your face — but you have acted on the whole 

Most nobly, and I own it from my soul. 

And when I use the phrase of 'Auld Lang Syne!' 
'Tis not addressed to you — the more's the pity 

For me, for I would rather take my wine 

With you, than aught (save Scott) in your proud 
city." 

Miss Anna Seward, that plump Swan of Lichfield 
whose story has been told so charmingly of late by 
E. V. Lucas, was plainly enraged when she wrote to 
Sir Walter Scott on June 20, 1806: "Not even you 
can teach me to esteem him whom you call your little 
friend Jefrey, the Edinburgh Reviewer. Jefries 
ought to have been his name, since so similar his na- 
ture. On his self-placed bench of decision on poetic 
works, he is all that Jefferies was when tyranny had 
thrown the judicial robe on his shoulder." 

It was in this year, 1806, when Jeffrey made such 
an attack upon the Odes and Epistles of Thomas 
Moore that a rather comical duel followed, which be- 
gan by Moore's telling Jeffrey a funny story and end- 
ed by the timely arrival of the police who haled the 
Scotchman and the Irishman, with their seconds, Hor- 
ner and Hume, to Bow Street, where all began to talk 
on literary subjects. "But whatever was the topic," 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 135 

writes Moore in his voluminous Memoirs, "Jeffrey, I 
recollect, expatiated upon it with all his peculiar flu- 
ency and eloquence ; and I can now most vividly recall 
him to my memory, as he lay upon his back on a form 
which stood beside the wall, pouring volubly forth his 
fluent but most oddly pronounced diction, and dress- 
ing his subject out in every variety of array that an 
ever rich and ready wardrobe of phraseology could 
supply." They took a liking each to the other and 
became warm friends; and Moore records with pride 
how Jeffrey said to him, twenty-one years later, re- 
ferring to the Life of Sheridan, "Here is a convinc- 
ing proof that you can think and reason solidly and 
manfully, and treat the gravest and most important 
subjects in a manner worthy of them." 

The poet had some provocation, for in the review of 
his poems (Edinburgh Review, No. xvi., July, 1806), 
Jeffrey had written of him as "the most licentious of 
modern versifiers, and the most poetical of the propa- 
gators of impiety," adding what Moore understood 
to be a charge of mercenary motives. The duelists 
met at Chalk Farm, but the police interfered and It 
was found that one of the pistols had no ball in it. So 
Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers could 
not refrain from saying: 

"Can none remember that eventful day, 
That ever glorious, almost fatal fray. 
When Little's leadless pistol met his eye 
And Bow Street myrmidons stood laughing by?" 

Moore insisted that his pistol was loaded, and tried 
to send a challenge to Byron, but the friend to whom 
it was entrusted contrived to forget all about it. Theo- 
dore Hook, in the Man of Sorrow perpetrated this 
epigram : 



136 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"When Anacreon would fight, as the poets have said, 

A reverse he display'd in his vapor, 
For while all his poems were loaded with lead, 

His pistols were loaded with paper! 
For excuses, Anacreon old custom many thank, 

Such a salvo he would not abuse. 
For the cartridge, by rule, is alway made blank, 

Which is fired away at Reviews." 

The whole story is told fully in Moore's Memoirs 
as well as by Cockburn, and it is the subject of com- 
ment in many contemporary works. In Clayden's 
account of "Rogers and his Contemporaries," other 
details are furnished. The banker-poet is brought 
into the field. "Jeffrey," says Clayden, "had written 
a slashing review of Moore's Epistles, Odes and other 
Poems, in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1806, and 
was apparently conscious that he had done Moore in- 
justice. Rogers met him at Lord Fincastle's at dinner 
in the early summer, and the conversation turned on 
Moore. Lord Fincastle described the new poet as 
having great amenity of manner, and Jeffrey laughing- 
ly replied, 'I am afraid he would not show much 
amenity to me.' The insult and challenge followed 
soon after this conversation, and a meeting was ar- 
ranged at Chalk Farm. William Spencer had heard 
of it, and had told the police, and, when the combatants 
were about to fire, the police appeared and took them 
all off to the station. Moore sent for Spencer to bail 
him, but Rogers had heard of the arrest and was on 
the spot in time to give the necessary security. This 
quarrel of two friends gave Rogers an opportunity of 
playing his favorite part of peacemaker. He carried 
messages between the combatants, containing, as Moore 
says, those formalities of explanation which the world 
requires, and arranged that they should meet at his 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 137 

house." Rogers, In his Table Talk, gives a brief ac- 
count of his relation to the duel, and adds : *'The poet 
and the critic were mutually reconciled by means of 
Horner and myself : they shook hands with each other 
in the garden behind my house." They may have 
shaken hands there, but it is doubtful whether Rogers 
really had as much to do with the reconciliation as all 
this Implies. In Clayden's book is given In full the let- 
ter of Jeffrey to Rogers, written from Edinburgh, July 
30, 18 19, In which his generous liberality Is exhibited. 
He says: 

t'l have been very much shocked and disturbed by 
observing in the newspapers the great pecuniary calam- 
ity which has fallen on our excellent friend Moore, and 
not being able to get any distinct Information either as 
to its extent, or Its probable consequences, from any- 
body here, I have thought it best to relieve my anxiety 
by applying to you, whose kind concern in him must 
both have made you acquainted with all the particulars, 
and willing, I hope, to satisfy the enquiries of one who 
sincerely shares in that concern. * * * j have, 
unfortunately, not a great deal of money to spare. But 
if it should be found practicable to relieve him from 
this unmerited distress by any contribution, I beg leave 
to say that I shall think It an honor to be allowed to 
take share In it to the extent of 300 /. or 500 /., and 
that I could advance more than double the sum named 
above upon any reasonable security of ultimate repay- 
ment, however long postponed." 

In his own account of the Moore affair, Jeffrey, 
writing to his friend, George Bell (August 22, 1806), 
says : 

"Moore agreed to withdraw his defiance; and then 
I had no hesitation in assuring him (as I was ready to 
have done at the beginning, if he had applied arnica- 



138 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

bly) that in writing the review I considered myself 
merely as the censor of the morality of his book, and 
that I intended to assert nothing as to the personal mo- 
tives or personal character of the author, of whom 
I had no knowledge at the time. * * * ^y^ have 
since breakfasted together very lovingly. * * * 
You are too severe upon the little man. He has be- 
haved with great spirit throughout this business. He 
really is not profligate, and is universally regarded, 
even by those who resent the style of his poetry, as 
an innocent, good-hearted, idle fellow. * * * 
We were very near going to Hamburgh after we had 
been bound over here; but it is much better as it is. I 
am glad to have gone through this scene, both be- 
cause it satisfies me that my nerves are good enough 
to enable me to act in conformity to my notions of 
propriety without any suffering, and because it also as- 
sures me that I am really as little in love with life as 
I have been for some time in the habit of professing." 

This indifference to life arose from the depression 
caused by the death of his sister Mary (Mrs. Napier) 
and by a still greater affliction which for a time threat- 
ened to drive him from his literary and professional 
work. His wife, whom he loved devotedly, died on 
August 8, 1805. 

The Edinburgh was not destined to continue long 
without a rival. Its open disapproval of the war with 
France, rather than its advocacy of domestic reforms, 
not only aroused the indignation of the Tories but 
offended many of the moderate men of the class who 
consider it to be unpatriotic to oppose a government 
during the pendency of a conflict in which the nation 
may be at the time engaged, however they may have 
deplored the beginning of such a conflict. We had ex- 
amples of our own in the Civil War of 1861-1865, and 
in the Spanish War of 1898. The final offense which 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 139 

provoked the loyal Britons was a review by Jeffrey 
(with some help from Brougham) of Don Pedro 
Ceballos's account of the French Usurpation in Spain, 
which appeared in the number for October, 1808. 
Jeffrey "dared to despair of what was then called the 
regeneration of Spain; and this at the. very moment 
when the hearts of most of the English people were 
agitated with delight in the belief that this glorious 
change had already begun and that the Peninsula was 
henceforth to be inhabited by a population of pa- 
triots."* Jeffrey was more accurate in his forecast 
than he was a little later when he wrote to Horner 
that his "honest impression" was that Bonaparte would 
be "in Dublin in about fifteen months, perhaps sooner." 
In that event, he said he would "try to go to America." 
The Tories brought out their Quarterly Review in 
February, 1809, and Sir Walter Scott went over to it. 
It does not seem to have injured the Edinburgh seri- 
ously. When Jeffrey saw the first number he wrote : 

"I have seen the Quarterly this morning. It is an 
Inspired work, compared with the pen prattle of Cum- 
berland. But I do not think it very formidable; and 
if it were not for our offences, I should have no fear 
about its consequences." 

In March he wrote to Horner: 

"Tell me what you hear, and what you think of this 
new Quarterly; and do not let yourself imagine that I 
feel any unworthy jealousy, and still less any unworthy 
fear, on the occasion. My natural indolence would 
have been better pleased not to be always in sight of 
an alert and keen antagonist. But I do rejoice at 
the prospect of this kind of literature, which seems to 
be more and more attended to than any other, being 

*Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey. I-192. 



I40 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

generally improved in quality, and shall be found to 
have set an example." 

This was manifestly said in all sincerity, and Jeffrey 
was shrewd enough to perceive that rivalry and com- 
petition would advance the fortunes of his Review in- 
stead of retarding them. In fact, the Edinburgh was 
not at first particularly Whiggish. Scott, who was any- 
thing but a Whig, had been a contributor for years 
before the Ceballos article appeared, and as late as 
1807 advised Southey to follow his example. In No- 
vember, 1808, Scott wrote to his brother-in-law, say- 
ing that Jeffrey had "offered terms of pacification, en- 
gaging that no party politics should again appear in 
his 'Review'," but after this letter had been given out 
in Lockhart's Life, Jeffrey insisted, in the preface to 
his collected essays, that he had been misunderstood 
and added that he had told Sir Walter that he had 
for six years regarded politics as "the right leg" of the 
Review. The real attitude of Jeffrey is shown by a let- 
ter which he wrote to Horner, on December 6, 1808, 
quoted by Horner in his Memoirs (i. 464) when, ask- 
ing help in the day of need, he told Horner to write 
anything, "only no party politics, and nothing but ex- 
emplary moderation and impartiality on all politics." 
In fact, while his contributors were all inclined to lib- 
eralism, Jeffrey himself wrote very few political essays. 
His tendency was Whiggish, but he was not enthusi- 
astic; he was not a sympathizer with Cobbett or Ben- 
tham, and even thought that Carlyle was too much in 
earnest. The radicals. Sir Leslie Stephen says, regarded 
him as a mere trimmer. So he met with the approval 
of neither faction of extremists, the usual fate of hon- 
est men who have a strong sense of justice and abhor 
tyranny whether of the mob or of the aristocracy. 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 141 

In 1803 he decided not to accept a professorship 
of moral and poHtical science in a college at Calcutta, 
although, according to Horner, his professional income 
was then only about £240. In that year he "became 
an ensign in a volunteer regiment, with a strong con- 
viction that an invasion was imminent, but showed so 
little military aptitude that he was never at home in 
his uniform, and could hardly, according to Cockburn, 
"face his company to the right or left." His social suc- 
cess, however, was marked, but he was despondent, as 
we have seen, after the death of his sister and of his 
wife, following the loss of his child, born in September, 
1802, and dying in October of the same year. He 
bravely worked on and with courage pursued his way 
both in society and in his literary and professional 
labor*. His practice grew, and, although he was neither 
learned nor profound, he was successful before juries 
and often argued appeals in the House of Lords. 
After 1807 he had, as Cockburn says, an "unchallenged 
monopoly on one side," before the general assembly, 
and when the jury system for the trial of issues of fact 
in civil cases was introduced in 18 16, he was employed 
in almost every trial. His manner was artificial, he 
had a tendency to refine too much, but he had an ex- 
cellent memory for details, much sagacity, and a charm 
of manner which was most effective before juries and 
popular bodies. He was engaged in the trial of Mac- 
laren and Bird for sedition in 18 17, and defended suc- 
cessfully several criminals. So his repute as a lawyer 
increased in spite of his editorial occupations. 

In 1 8 10 he removed from Queen Street to 92 
George Street, which was his Edinburgh home until 
he moved to 24 Moray Place in 1827. In 18 10 he 
became acquainted with a daughter of Charles Wilkes 



142 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

of New York, who was visiting Scotland in company 
with her aunt. She was a grand-niece of John Wilkes 
and a near connection of Captain Charles Wilkes, 
long years afterwards famous as an explorer and as 
the captor of Mason and Shdell. He fell in love with 
her, and after her return to America decided to go 
there, leaving his clients to look after themselves as 
best they might and entrusting the Review to his 
friends. He had a most uncomfortable voyage, but 
reached New York in October, 1813, and married 
Miss Wilkes very soon afterwards, returning to Eng- 
land in February, 18 14. 

In may not be without interest to Americans to re- 
member that he never shared in the hostility towards 
them which was prevalent in his time. Perhaps his 
personal experiences in the United States in 1813- 
18 14 and his marriage to an American woman were 
accountable in part for his friendliness. On his visit 
he had two interviews with the men whom Lord Cock- 
burn— with the fine indifference of a Briton to the 
names of our public officials— calls "Mr. Munroe, the 
Secretary" and "Mr. Maddison, the President," with 
whom he discussed fully the problems of the pending 
war; and he dined with the President.* 

Naturally his views were not in accord with those 
of Madison and Monroe, but the debate appears, by 
Jeffrey's account, to have been conducted with dignity 
and courtesy although without any practical result. 
The truth is that neither party to the "War of 18 12" 

*Cockburn, I., 226-227. It is curious that long years after- 
wards, Sir Alexander James Cockburn, at a dinner, asked a 
relative of mine why Chief Justice Chase did not come over to 
England, as they w^ould be glad to do him honor. Chase had 
died some time before, but the Lord Chief Justice had not 
heard of it. 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 143 

could afford to boast very much about the merits of 
its cause, and both of the belligerents were wrong in 
many ways. In May, 1820, Jeffrey published an ar- 
ticle in the Edinburgh on the jealousies between Amer- 
ica and Great Britain, of which Cockburn says: 

"He had constantly endeavored to remove the irri- 
tations which made these two kindred nations think 
so uncharitably and so absurdly of each other." 

When Jeffrey reprinted the paper in his Selected 
Contributions he added in a note : 

"There is no one feeling, having public concerns 
for its object, with which I have been so long and so 
deeply impressed, as that of the vast importance of 
our maintaining friendly, and even cordial relations, 
with the free, peaceful, moral, and industrious States 
of America — a condition upon which I cannot help 
thinking that not only our own freedom and prosper- 
ity, but that of the better part of the world, will ul- 
timately be found to be more and more dependent." 

Like many Britons, he was at his worst in a foreign 
country and appears to have created an impression 
wholly erroneous regarding his personality. George 
Ticknor, who met him in the United States, and after- 
wards again in Edinburgh in 18 19, says in his Journals 
that Jeffrey "both here and in his own house and all 
society, was a much more domestic, quiet sort of per- 
son that we found him in America." One of the best 
pen portraits of him is given by Ticknor in a letter to 
his friend, Charles S. Davies of Portland, dated oa 
February 8, 18 14,* in which he says: 

"I had seriously intended to send you a sketch of 
the Abraham of the Edinburgh Review, while I was 

*Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor, I., 43. 



144 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

running over with speculations and opinions about 
him.* * * 

"You are to imagine * * * before you, a 
short, stout little gentleman, about five and a half feet 
high, with a very red face, black hair, and black eyes. 
You are to suppose him to possess a very gay and ani- 
mated countenance, and you are to see in him all the 
restlessness of a will-o'-wisp, and all that fitful irregu- 
larity in his movements which you have heretofore 
appropriated to the pasteboard Merry Andrews 
whose limbs are jerked about with a wire. These you 
are to interpret as the natural indication of the im- 
petuous and impatient character which a further ac- 
quaintance develops. 

"He enters a room with a countenance so satisfied, 
and a step so light and almost fantastic, that all your 
previous impressions of the dignity and severity of the 
Edinburgh Review are immediately put to flight, and, 
passing at once to the opposite extreme, you might, 
perhaps, imagine him to be frivolous, vain, and super- 
cilious. He accosts you, too, with a freedom and 
familiarity which may, perhaps, put you at your ease, 
and render conversation unceremonious; but which, 
as I observed in several instances, were not very toler- 
able to those who had always been accustomed to the 
delicacy and decorum of refined society. Mr. Jeffrey, 
therefore, I remarked, often suffered from the pre- 
possessions of those he met, before any regular con- 
versation commenced, and almost before the tones of 
his voice were heard. It is not possible, however, to 
be long in his presence without understanding some- 
thing of his real character — for the same promptness 
and assurance which mark his entrance into a room 
carry him at once into conversation. The moment a 
topic is suggested — no matter what or by whom— he 
comes forth, and the first thing you observe is his 
singular fluency. 

"He bursts upon you with a torrent of remarks, and 
you are for some time so much amused with his earn- 
estness and volubility, that you forget to ask yourself 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 145 

whether they have either appropriateness or meaning. 
When, however, you come to consider his remarks 
closely, you are surprised to find that, nothwithstand- 
ing his prodigious rapidity, the current of his langu- 
age never flows faster than the current of his thoughts. 
You are surprised to discover that he is never, like 
other impetuous speakers, driven to amplification and 
repetition in order to gain time to collect and arrange 
his ideas; you are surprised to find that, while his con- 
versation is poured forth in such a fervor and tumult 
of eloquence that you can scarcely follow or compre- 
hend it, it is still as compact and logical as if he were 
contending for a victory in the schools or for a deci- 
sion from the bench. 

"After all this, however, you do not begin to un- 
derstand Mr. Jeffrey's character; for it is not until you 
become interested in the mere discussion, until you 
forget his earnestness, his volubility, and his skill, that 
you begin to feel something of the full extent of his 
powers. You do not, till then, see with how strong 
and steady a hand he seizes the subject, and with what 
ease, as well as dexterity, he turns and examines it on 
every side. You are not, until then, convinced that he 
but plays with what is the labor of ordinary minds, 
and that half his faculties are not called into exercise 
by what you at first suppose would tax his whole 
strength. And, after all, you are able to estimate him, 
not by what you witness, — for he is always above a 
topic which can be made the subject of conversation, — 
but by what you imagine he would be able to do if he 
were excited by a great and difficult subject and a pow- 
erful adversary. 

"With all this, he preserves in your estimation a 
transparent simplicity of character. You are satisfied 
that he does nothing for effect and show; you see that 
he never chooses the subject, and never leads the con- 
versation in such a way as best to display his own 
powers and acquirements. You see that he is not am- 
bitious of being thought a wit; and that, when he has 
been most fortunate in his argument or illustration, he 



146 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

never looks round, as some great men do, to observe 
what impression he has produced upon his hearers. In 
short, you could not be in his presence an hour with- 
out being convinced that he has neither artifice nor 
affectation; that he does not talk from the pride of 
skill or of victory, but because his mind is full to over- 
flowing, and conversation is his relief and pleasure. 

"But nothwithstanding everybody saw and acknowl- 
edged these traits in Mr. Jeffrey's character, he was 
very far from winning the good opinion of all. There 
were still not a few who complained that he was super- 
cilious, and that he thought himself of a different and 
higher order from those he met; that he had been used 
to dictate until he was unwilling to listen, and that he 
had been fed upon admiration until it had become 
common food, and he received it as a matter of course. 

"There is some ground for this complaint, but I 
think the circumstances of the case should take its edge 
from censure. It seems to me that Mr. Jeffrey has 
enough of that amiable feeling from which politeness 
and the whole system of the petite morale springs. But 
that he has not learned the necessary art of distribut- 
ing it in judicious proportions. He shows the same 
degree of deference to every one he meets; and, there- 
fore, while he flatters by his civility those who are lit- 
tle accustomed to attention from their superiors, he 
disappoints the reasonable expectations of those who 
have received the homage of all around them until it 
has become a part of their just expectations and 
claims. 

"This, at least, was the distinction here. The 
young men and the literary men all admired him; the 
old men and the politicians found their opinions and 
dignity too little regarded by the impetuous stranger. 
The reasons of this are to be sought, I think, in his 
education and constitution; and I was, therefore, not 
disposed to like him less for his defect. I was not dis- 
posed to claim for a man who must have passed his 
youth in severe and solitary study, and who was not 
brought into that class of society which refines and 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 147 

fashions all the external expressions of character, un- 
til his mind and habits were matured, and he was 
brought there to be admired and to dictate. I was not 
disposed to claim from him that gentleness and deli- 
cacy of manners which are acquired only by early dis- 
cipline, and which are most obvious in those who have 
received, perhaps, their very character and direction 
from early collision with their superiors in station or 
talent. 

"Besides, even admitting that Mr. Jeffrey could 
have early been introduced to refined society, still I do 
not think his character would have been much changed; 
or, if it had been, that it would have been changed for 
the better. I do not think it would have been possible 
to have drilled him into the strict forms of society and 
hienseance without taking from him something we 
should be very sorry to lose. 

"There seems to me to be a prodigious rapidity in 
his mind which could not be taken away without di- 
minishing its force; and yet it is this rapidity, I think, 
which often offended some of my older friends, in the 
form of impatience and abruptness. He has, too, a 
promptness and decision which contribute, no doubt, 
to the general power of his mind, and certainly could 
not be repressed without taking away much of that 
zeal which carries him forward in his labors, and gives 
so lively an interest to his conversation; yet you could 
not be an hour in his presence without observing that 
his promptness and decision very often make him ap- 
pear peremptory and assuming. 

"In short, he has such a familiar acquaintance with 
almost all the subjects of human knowledge, and con- 
sequently such an intimate conviction that he is right, 
and such a habit of carrying his point; he passes, as it 
seems to me, with such intuitive rapidity from thought 
to thought, and subject to subject, that his mind is 
completely occupied and satisfied with its own knowl- 
edge and operations, and has no attention left to be- 
stow on the tones and manner of expression. He Is, 
in fact, so much absorbed with the weightier matters of 



148 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

the discussion, — with the subject, the argument, and 
the illustrations, — that he forgets the small tithe of 
humanity and forbearance which he owes to every 
one with whom he converses ; and I was not one of 
those who ever wished to correct his forgetfulness, or 
remind him of his debt." 

This is all very graphic, but it is amazing to observe 
the lofty attitude of the young New Englander of 
twenty-three, for that was Ticknor's age when he thus 
delivered his judgment. One may indulge in a little 
merriment over his airy affectation of social superior- 
ity. When we realize what Jeffrey's social life had 
been, the patronizing tone, the assumption of dignity, 
conveyed by the lad's phrases, moves us to laughter. 
The solemn prigs of Massachusetts of 1814 — so wise 
and great in their petty environment! — what was their 
dull, provincial society compared with that in which 
Jeffrey had been an ornament for years ! Still, most 
of Ticknor's comments are worthy of notice; much 
may be forgiven to a confirmed Bostonian, who con- 
siders the Bostonian standard as the highest ever at- 
tained or ever dreamed of by mortal man. 

Despite the air of tolerance which Mr. Ticknor dis- 
plays with regard to Jeffrey in social life, It may not be 
amiss to recall that in a circle at least as worthy of es- 
teem as that of Boston, he was received without ques- 
tion. He was always welcome in the refined precincts 
of Holland House, and indeed In all the Whig society 
of London, but as Mr. Sanders says in "The Holland 
House Circle," the appearances there of "the hard 
working Scotch lawyer and vigorous, if obscurantist 
writer, were comparatively rare except during the brief 
period when he sat In the Reform Parliament." In 
181 1 his London campaign Included a large dinner 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 149 

party at Holland House, where the hostess was ''in 
great gentleness and softness," and where he failed to 
appreciate the charm of Lady Caroline Lamb. He 
seems not to have revisited Holland House until 1840, 
when he had "a sweet walk under the cedars and in the 
garden, where he listened in vain for the nightingales; 
though Lord Holland and Allen challenged them to 
answer by divers fat and asthmatical whistles." Jef- 
frey kept up his acquaintance with Lady Holland in her 
widowhood.* That lady writes of him to Mrs. Creevey 
in 1 8 14, "Do not be surprised at receiving a visit from 
that very dear little man, who has the best heart and 
temper, although the authors of the day consider him 
as their greatest scourge. * * * Yq^ ^m think 
as much of his acquaintance, as he is full of wit, anec- 
dote and lively sallies. "t 

IV. 

His devotion to his family was one of his most 
charming traits. In 18 15 he took up his country resi- 
dence at Craigcrook, three miles northwest of Edin- 
burgh. Moore, visiting him there in 1825, says: 

"Jeffrey cannot bear to stir without his wife and 
child; requires something living and breathing near 
him and is miserable when alone." 

Craigcrook had been the home of Constable, and 
his son, Thomas Constable, quotes a letter from Jef- 
frey to his father, written August 25, 18 14, to show 
"the unfailing consideration and the liberal kindness 
that were Mr. Jeffrey's eminent characteristics," offer- 
ing, although he could not use the place for some con- 



*The Holland House Circle. 257. London, 1908. 
fCreevey Papers. I, 205. 



ISO EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

siderable time, to pay for it at any time or to grant any 
moderate accommodation in money if any exigency in 
Constable's affairs required it. He also gives another 
letter to illustrate Jeffrey's liberality. By some care- 
lessness, there had been delay in paying for an article 
in the Review. Jeffrey wrote to Constable : 

"Here, by God's grace, is Mr. L.'s honorarium. 
Pray let it be sent off instantly to him, at Longman's 
& Co., and desire them to pay him or offer him ten 
guineas for the delay and disappointment. I mulct 
myself of this fine. * * * j deserve this for my 
negligence, and besides it is right that the Review and 
its management should not be liable to the imputation 
of shabbiness, even from the shabby." 

Two letters from Jeffrey to Hazlitt, written in 1818, 
are given by Constable, relating to a proposed suit at 
law which Hazlitt wished to begin against Blackwood^ s 
Magazine, which are too long for full quotation, but 
which show distinctly "the generous, yet wise and 
honest nature of the writer."* 

In one of these letters he says: 

"I am concerned to find your health Is not as good as 
It should be, and that you would take more care of 
It if your finances were in better order. We can- 
not let a man of genius suffer in this way, and I hope 
you are in no serious danger. I take the liberty of en- 
closing £100, a great part of which I shall owe you in 
a few weeks, and the rest you shall pay me back in re- 
views whenever you can do so without putting your- 
self to any uneasiness. If you really want another 
£100 tell me plainly and it shall be heartily at your ser- 
vice." 

One morning he received a letter from Hazlitt, say- 



*Archibalci Constable and his Literary Correspondence 

(1873). 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 151 

Ing, "I am dying; can you send me £10 and so con- 
summate your many kindnesses to me?" Jeffrey sent 
a check for £50, but whether it saved Hazlitt's life I 
am unable to discover. 

The house in Moray Place, then the new part of 
Edinburgh, looked out on the Forth on one side and to 
a green garden on the other. Macaulay, no doubt in- 
tending to confer upon it the highest badge of dis- 
tinction which an Englishman can bestow upon a dwell- 
ing-place, pronounced it to be "really equal to the 
houses in Grosvenor Square." Macaulay stopped with 
him there in 1828, and wrote to his mother:* 

/In one thing, as far as I have observed, he is always 
the same; and that is the warmth of his domestic af- 
fections. Neither Mr. Wilberforce nor my uncle 
Babington comes up to him in this respect. The flow 
of his kindness is quite inexhaustible. Not five min- 
utes pass without some fond expression or caressing 
gesture to his wife or his daughter. He has fitted up 
a study for himself, but he never goes into it. Law 
papers, reviews, whatever he has to write, he writes 
in the drawing room or in his wife's boudoir. When he 
goes to other parts of the country on a retainer, he 
takes them in the carriage with him. I do not wonder 
that he should be a good husband; for his wife is a 
very amiable woman. But I was surprised to see a 
man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer, pour- 
ing himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in 
all sorts of affectionate nonsense." 

On July 2, 1829, he was unanimously elected Dean 
of the Faculty of Advocates, a position of honor. His 
opinion was that the "head of a great law corporation" 
should not "continue to be the conductor of what might 
be fairly enough represented as in many respects a party 



*Trevelyan's Macaulay. I. 143 (Am. Edn.). 



152 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

journal." So he withdrew from the management of 
the Edinburgh Review. The number for June, 1829, 
was the last one edited by him, and thereafter he con- 
tributed to the magazine not more than five or six arti- 
cles. 

A few years later his friend Cockburn urged him 
in vain to undertake some work of original composi- 
tion, but he could not be persuaded. In reply to Cock- 
burn he wrote, on August 28, 1835: 

"I have been delighting myself with Mackintosh. 
I only got the book two days ago and have done noth- 
ing but read it ever since. The richness of his mind 
intoxicates me. And yet do you not think he would 
have been a happier man, and quite as useful and re- 
spectable, if he had not fancied it a duty to write a 
great book? And is not this question an answer to 
your exhortation to me to write a little one? I have 
no sense of duty that way, and feel that the only sure 
or even probable result of the attempt would be hours 
and days of anxiety, and unwholesome toil, and a 
closing scene of mortification." 

Of his two hundred contributions to the Edinburgh, 
seventy-nine were selected for publication in book form, 
in 1843; ^"^ ^ second edition, of three volumes, was 
issued five years later. These essays are not read 
now as are those of Macaulay, Hazlitt, Carlyle, or 
Mackintosh; because, while they have a certain charm 
and brightness, they possess no lasting qualities of 
style or of substance. They seem to be too fluent. As 
Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers said recently at Prince- 
ton—and he found it worth repeating in his interesting 
paper on the Autocrat in the Atlantic Monthly for 
August, 1909: 

"The writer who is usually fluent should take 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 153 

warning from the instructions which accompany his 
fountain pen: 'when this pen flows too freely it is a 
sign that it is nearly empty and should be filled'." 

They seem to be wanting in depth and solidity. An 
American writer well says; 

"He was French in his literary aptitudes and quali- 
ties; never heavy: touching things with a feather's 
point, yet touching them none the less surely." 

But touching things with a feather's point, however 
surely, leaves but a slight impression and time effaces 
it without mercy. Yet it has also been said of him 
that he "with his clear, legal mind, his stabbing and 
brilliant manner of expression, his sarcasm, cold and 
sharp-edged as a Toledo blade, unfortunately only too 
capable of wounding too deeply — won the position of 
the greatest English critic of all time and of the most 
eminent Scottish lawyer of the day — achieving the 
highest honors open to the advocates of Edinburgh."* 
It is the fate of men like him to be overestimated by 
their contemporaries and underrated by those who come 
after them. 

He wrote for the Edinburgh a long review of Ali- 
son's Essays on Taste, which, in 18 16, he used for 
the article on Beauty in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 
This appeared later as a small volume. 

His letters were always delightful; those to the 
American relatives of his wife, describing her new 
home life, are admirable. He wrote often to Mrs. 
Waddington— Georgiana Port, grand-niece of Mrs. 
Delany,— and in some of his letters to her he speaks 
quite frankly on literary matters. In 1 8 1 2 he writes : 

*Curwen. History of Booksellers. 117. 



154 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"As for Alison, Its review, which you call abuse, is 
the best I ever wrote on a matter of free speculation, 
and Burke and Price are both wrong. This is one of 
the few things I am sure about, and I really have a 
strong desire to convert you to the right path. For 
Madame de Stael, I have never seen her U Allemagne 
yet, and never asked for it. You see what a savage 
I am. Moreover, I do not greatly admire her, and 
I do not tolerate idolatry. Corinne is clever, and 
upon the strength of your recommendation I shall get 
the other immediately and review it candidly, if I 
find anything to say about it. * * * There are 
some wild poems published here by a lad of the name 
of Wilson [The Isle of Palms was published early in 
1812], a seraph of the Lake School, and very amiable. 
Lord Byron has also published a quarto of a strange 
sort of gloomy, misanthropical poetry* — but power- 
ful and vigorous. I have thoughts of reviewing 
both." 

In 1 8 14, answering Mrs. Waddington's request to 
review Madame D'Arblay's latest book — she was no 
longer the great Fanny Burney and had lost the art 
which made Johnson and Burke sit up all night to read 
Evelina — he writes : 

'T don't know what to say to you about the Wan- 
derer. The cry is pretty general against it, and 
among judicious and good people as well as others. 
There is no disguising the fact, and I am afraid there 
is only one way of accounting for it, not that the judges 
are — but that the work is bad. If a popular work— 
I mean a work intended to please and Instruct general 
readers — Is generally disliked, how can it be a good 
work? There is no way of getting over that. Yet 
you must know that I like the book better than any- 
body I meet with here — and better than anybody al- 
most that I have heard of but you. I think it has 

*The first two cantos of Childe Harold. 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 155 

great faults, but I do not think it very much inferior 
to her earlier works, the faults of which seem to be 
forgotten in order to contrast their excellence with the 
faults of this, which is worse written than they are, 
and a little more diffuse, but has the same merits of 
brilliant coloring, decided character, and occasional 
elegance. Now I can't tell whether I shall review it 
or not, nor can I promise to speak of it as you do, if I 
should. Gently and favorably I certainly shall speak, 
because I have the highest veneration for the per- 
sonal character of the author; but I must speak what 
I think. I do not think it quite pretty in her not to say 
a word in that long, foolish preface, of Miss Edge- 
worth, of Madame de Stael, and to praise herself so 
directly. The last may be partly simplicity of char- 
acter; the first looks petty." 

It was not until February, 18 15, that the partly- 
promised review appeared, mainly a discussion of the 
general subject of "novels of manners." As to the 
book itself, he calls attention to the absurdities of the 
plot observing "that in the conduct of a story she never 
excelled, while her characters are equally superficial 
and confined." "We are sorry," he concludes, "to speak 
so disadvantageously of the work of so excellent and 
favorite a writer; and the more so as we perceive no 
decay of talent, but only a perversion of it."* Most 
of us would think that he was too gentle in dealing 
with the stupid story, whose style Macaulay described 
as "a barbarous patois'^ a sort of "broken Johnsonese," 
and one marvels that it could have been written by the 
author of the Diary, which ranks with that of Pepys, 
among the best in the language. 

The second volume of Cockburn's Life is made up 
entirely of letters. They are far more interesting than 



*Side-Lights on the Georgian Period: George Paston, 48. 



156 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

the Life itself, which is a stupid affair, containing long 
accounts of men who happened to be friends and ac- 
quaintances of Jeffrey and of the biographer, but who 
might have been dismissed with a mere reference. It 
is not divided into chapters and, worst of all, it has 
no index. Some original unpublished letters are in 
my possession. From the letter to his sister I have 
already quoted. Most of them are to John Richard- 
son, an eminent Scottish solicitor, of whom Jeffrey was 
very fond. Unfortunately the chirography is so atro- 
cious that it almost defies translation. Of his wretched 
scrawl Lady Holland says in her Memoirs of Sydney 
Smith : 

"My father wrote to him, on receiving one of his 
letters, 'My dear Jeffrey: — We are much obliged by 
your letter, but should be still more so were it legible. 
I have tried to read it from left to right, and Mrs. 
Sydney from right to left, and w^e neither of us can 
decipher a single word of it.' " 

In one of these letters, dated November 10, 18 18, 
he mentions the recent death of Romilly by suicide, 
and says: 

"It is a tremendous revelation, this of Romilly's 
death, and yet I cannot help considering it as rather 
an heroic ending." 

The rest is undecipherable — unless by some expert in 
Assyrian inscriptions. In another, written from Edin- 
burgh on February 8, 1825, he reveals his kindly senti- 
ments in regard to Thomas Campbell. He says : 

"My dear Richardson :—Altho' the new No. of 
the Review will be out within ten days, I am tempted 
to gratify Campbell's natural impatience to know how 
we have treated him, by sending him a separate copy 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 157 

of my article on his new volume,* and not being sure 
of his address, I take the liberty of enclosing it to you. 
You may perhaps like to take a look of it in passing, 
and think this privilege a sufficient indemnification for 
the double postage to which it will subject you, if not, 
you must put it to my account. You will see I have 
treated him kindly — indeed I should not have the 
heart, I am afraid, to treat him otherwise, even if I 
thought he deserved it. But I really think, in sub- 
stance, all I have said of him, tho' I might have ex- 
pressed it less warmly and added other thoughts. Give 
my love to him and tell me how near I have come to 
pleasing him. You see I have done him the honor 
of placing him at the fore of the No. and consequently 
I have had this sheet by me for a fortnight. But I 
have forborne sending it for fear of its contents find- 
ing their way into some newspaper or magazine — 
against the possibility of which I beg you to caution 
the said Editorial pest, and to secure obedience to this 
caution I would recommend his burning the said sheet 
as soon as he has sufficiently perused it. * * * 
We are a little anxious about the Judicature Bill. 
When you hear any certain tidings of it, do let us 
know. What is the worshipful the Solr. doing up 
among you? What trim is Brougham in? What is 
to be done with Ireland? We have a strong paper 
on that subject in this No, which I am anxious to have 
out before decisive measures are adopted." 

Another letter is to Talfourd, and it is an additional 
disclosure of his generous disposition: 

Edinburgh, 9 May, 1836. 
My dear Serjeant — I wrote to Spring Rice the day 
after I received your new supplication for poor Leigh 
Hunt, and entreated him to confer favorably with you 
on the subject. Yesterday I had his answer, saying 
that he had nothing whatever to say as to selecting or 

*Campbeirs Theodoric, and Other Poems: No. 82, Arti- 
cle I, # 



158 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

suggesting who should have pensions, and that this 
was strictly and entirely in the department of Lord 
Melbourne, to whom, however, he promised to com- 
municate what I had written. I have been making 
an application very nearly to the same effect with your 
friend, Dr. Bowring, with whom I suppose you are 
in communication, and whom I beg you will assure of 
my most hearty concurrence in so kind a suit. He 
seems to think Lord M. well disposed and if you get 
up a tolerable show of conservative auxiliaries, I shall 
have good hopes of success. I shall be most happy 
to hear of your progress, and to lend any little aid 
in my power. I have still a pleasing presentiment 
that I am to have the gratification of seeing you here 
in the course of the summer. In the meantime pray 
do not forget me. 

Always very faithfully yours, 

F. Jeffrey. 
To Mr. Serjeant Talfourd, &c., &c. 

Almost every one who refers to Macaulay's early 
life quotes what Jeffrey wrote to him in acknowledg- 
ing the receipt of the manuscript of the essay on Mil- 
ton, which appeared in the Edinburgh in August, 1825 : 

"The more I think the less I can conceive where 
you picked up that style." 

It was a hasty remark, no doubt, and not meant to 
be embalmed for posterity; for Jeffrey surely knew that 
"style" is the result either of an inborn power of using 
language in a particular way or of care, study and wide 
reading; it is never "picked up." 

It was easy for him to detect the signs of promise 
in a young contributor. He recognized Carlyle's merit 
at once, and the record of his relations with the Carlyles 
is an honorable one. He soon became their friend and 
benefactor, and for several years the articles in the 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 159 

Review were one of the main sources of their income. 
It was difficult for Carlyle to be grateful to any one; 
but he came very near to gratitude towards Jeffrey. 
In the "Two Note Books," he says (1830), "Francis 
Jeffrey the other week offered me a hundred a year, 
having learned that this sum met my yearly wants; 
he did it neatly enough, and I had no doubt of his 
sincerity." In his "Reminiscences" he writes: 

"Jeffrey about this time generously offered to con- 
fer on me an annuity of £100." 

Charles Eliot Norton, in his footnote to this passage, 
refers to Carlyle's acute analysis of his own and Jeff- 
rey's feelings in the matter, and adds that Carlyle 
hardly does justice to the simplicity of Jeffrey's kind 
intention. Carlyle refused to receive the gift, and per- 
haps he was right. 

Froude gives us the story of the proposed annunity 
quite fully. He says: 

^Jeffrey's anxiety to be of use did not end in recom- 
mendations to Napier. He knew how the Carlyles 
were situated in money matters. He knew that they 
were poor, and that their poverty had risen from a 
voluntary surrender of means which were properly 
their own, but which they would not touch while Mrs. 
Welsh was alive. He knew also that Carlyle had 
educated and was still supporting, his brother out of 
his own slender earnings. He saw, as he supposed, a 
man of real brilliancy and genius weighed down and 
prevented from doing justice to himself by a drudg- 
ery which deprived him of the use of his more com- 
manding talents; and with a generosity the merit of 
which was only exceeded by the delicacy with which 
the offer was made, he proposed that Carlyle should 
accept a small annuity from him. Here again I re- 
gret that I am forbidden to print the admirable letter 



i6o EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

in which Jeffrey conveyed his desire, to which Carlyle 
in his own mention of this transaction has done but 
scanty justice. The whole matter, he said, should be 
an entire secret between them. He would tell no one 
— not even his wife. He bade Carlyle remember that 
he, too, would have been richer if he had not been 
himself a giver where there was less demand upon his 
liberality. He ought not to wish for a monopoly of 
generosity, and if he was really a religious man he 
must do as he would be done to ; nor, he added, would 
he have made the offer did he not feel that in similar 
circumstances he would have freely accepted it him- 
self. To show his confidence he enclosed 50 /., which 
he expected Carlyle to keep, and desired only to hear ) 
in reply that they had both done right." 

Later in the Note Books Carlyle records a visit 
of the Jeffreys and thus delivers himself: 

Very good and interesting beyond wont was our 
worthy Dean. He is growing old, and seems dispir- 
ited and partly unhappy." [Jeffrey was fifty-seven and 
could not have been remarkably aged.] "Jeffrey's 
essential talent sometimes seems to me to have been 
that of a Goldoni; some comic Dramatist, not with- 
out a touch of true lyrical pathos. He is the best 
mimic (in the lowest and highest senses) I ever saw. 

* * * He is one of the most loving men alive; 
has a true kindness, not of blood and habit only, but 
of soul and spirit. He cannot do without being loved. 

* * * I have heard him say: 'If Folly were the 
happiest, I would be a fool.' Yet his daily Life belies 
this doctrine, and says: 'Tho' Goodness were the 
most wretched, I would be Good.' In conversation 
he is brilliant (or rather sparkling) lively, kind, will- 
ing either to speak or listen, and above all men I have 
ever seen, ready and copious. On the whole, exceed- 
ingly pleasant in light talk. Yet alas light, light, too 
light! He will talk of nothing earnestly, tho' his 
look sometimes betrays an earnest feeling. * * * 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER i6i 

He Is not a strong man in any shape; but nimble and 
tough. He stands midway between God and Mam- 
mon; and his preaching thro' Hfe has been an attempt 
to reconcile these. Hence his popularity; a thing 
easily accountable when one looks at the world and at 
him; but little honourable to either. Literature! 
Poetry! except by active indestructible Instinct, which 
he has never dared to avow, yet being a true Poet (in 
his way could never eradicate ) — he knows not what 
they mean. A true Newspaper Critic, on the great 
scale ; no priest, but a Concionator ! Yet on the whole 
he is about the best man I ever saw. Sometimes I 
think he will abjure the Devil (If he live) and be- 
come a pure Light. Already he Is a most tricksy 
dainty beautiful little spirit; I have seen gleams on the 
face and eyes of the man that let you look into a high- 
er country. God bless him!" 

And this is the tribute paid by one who never did 
to anybody an act of disinterested kindness, an alleged 
philosopher who was always finding fault but was of no 
practical value to the world, to a man who was always 
doing good, a kindly, helpful man, whose life was love 
and who neither attained nor wished to attain that emi- 
nence as "a pure light" which manifests itself by the 
perpetual scolding of others. 

Jane Welsh Carlyle partially atones for the dubious 
praise accorded by her surly spouse. "Lord Jeffrey" 
she writes "came unexpectedly while the Count 
[D'Orsay] was here. What a difference! The prince 
of critics, and the prince of dandies. How washed out 
the beautiful dandiacal face looked beside that little 
clever old man's. The large blue dandiacal eyes, you 
would have said, had never contemplated anything more 
than the reflection of the handsome personage they 
pertained to. In a looking glass; while the dark, pene- 
trating eyes of the other had been taking note of most 



1 62 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

things in God's universe, even seeing a good way into 
mill stones."* Another worthy female — Harriet Marti- 
neau, who sneered at almost every one — thought Jeffrey 
"one of the most egregious flatterers of vain women in 
general." He had evidently flattered the lady atro- 
ciously. In her Autobiography, she expands her view, 
saying : 

"Whatever there might be of artificial in Jeffrey's 
manners — of a set 'company state of mind' and mode 
of conversation, — there was a warm heart under- 
neath, and an ingenuousness which added captivation 
to his intellectual graces. He could be absurd enough 
in his devotion to a clever woman; and he could be 
highly culpable in drawing out the vanity of a vain 
one, and then comically making game of it; but his 
better nature was always within call; and his generos- 
ity was unimpeachable in every other respect." 

With regard to Jeffrey's behavior towards women, 
Carlyle in his Reminiscences, has some pleasant things 
to say; 

"He had much the habit of flirting about with wo- 
men, especially pretty women, much more the both 
pretty and clever; all in a weakish, mostly dramatic, 
and wholly theoretic way (his age now fifty gone) ; 
would daintily kiss their hands in bidding good morn- 
ing, offer his due homage, as he phrased it; trip about, 
half like a lap-dog, half like a human adorer, with 
speeches pretty and witty, always of trifling import. 
I have known some women (not the prettiest) take 
offence at it, and awkwardly draw themselves up, but 
without the least putting him out. The most took it 
quietly, and found an entertainment to themselves in 
cleverly answering it, as he did in partly offering it; 
pertly, yet, with something of real reverence, and al- 



*Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. (1883.) 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 163 

ways in a dexterous, light way, * * * An airy 
environment of this kind was, whenever possible, a 
coveted charm in Jeffrey's way of life." 

Carlyle in his Reminiscences has left these records 
of his impressions of the man who so befriended him in 
the hour of need: 

f I used to find in him a finer talent than any he has 
evidenced in writing. This was chiefly when he got to 
speak Scotch, and gave me anecdotes of old Scotch 
Braxfield and vernacular (often enough but not al- 
ways cynical) curiosities of that type, which he did 
with a greatness of gusto quite peculiar to the topic, 
with a fine and deep sense of humor, of real comic 
mirth, much beyond what was noticeable in him other- 
wise, not to speak of the perfection of the mimicry, 
which itself was something. I used to think to my- 
self, 'Here is a man whom they have kneaded into the 
shape of an Edinburgh reviewer, and clothed the soul 
of in Whig formulas and blue and yellow; but he 
might have been a beautiful Goldoni too, or some- 
thing better in that kind, and have given us comedies 
and aerial pictures true and poetic of human life in 
a far other way.' There was something of Voltaire 
in him, something even in bodily features; those 
bright-beaming, swift and piercing hazel eyes, with 
their accompaniment of rapid, keen expression in the 
other lineaments of face, resembled one's notion of 
Voltaire; and in the voice, too, there was a fine half- 
plangent kind of metallic ringing tone which used to 
remind me of what I fancied Voltaire's voice might 
have been; Voix sombre et majesteuse,' Duvernet 
calls it." 

V. 

They must have been greatly addicted to talk for 
talk's sake in those days. There appears to have been 
far more interchange of words among the men of let- 



1 64 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

ters than there has been among the writers of recent 
generations. We read so much in all their intermin- 
able memoirs and in their voluminous correspondence, 
about "talk," and the merits of the talkers— talk at 
clubs, at dinners, in the salons, — talk morning, noon 
and night— that it is puzzling to find out how they 
ever found time to work. It must be owned that we 
are not favored with many records of what was actu- 
ally said, the few volumes of "Table Talk" being 
manifestly edited for publication so as to take all the 
spontaneity out of them; and the "jests" and "anec- 
dotes" which have been preserved to us seem mostly 
flat, stale and unprofitable, although there are a few 
deserving immortality, such as the one about Jeffrey's 
damning the North Pole and the resulting accusation 
by Sydney Smith of using disrespectful language about 
the equator. An example of the dreariness of some 
of these talks is afforded by the discussion between 
Moore, Rogers and Lord Holland and later between 
Moore and John Wilson about the wonderful joke 
of Sheridan delivered to Tarleton, and Lord John 
Russell's ludicrous note thereon in his edition of 
Moore's Memoirs. Moore expresses rather a gloomy 
opinion of this joke or hon mot. Lord Russell ap- 
pends this portentous remark: 

"Sheridan's joke to Tarleton. Any one might think 
the wit poor (although I do not agree with them) but 
the joke is clear enough. 'I was on a horse, and 
now Lm on an elephant,' i. e., 'I was high above 
others, but now I am much higher.' 'You were on an 
ass, and now you're on a mule,' said Sheridan: i. e.y 
'You were stupid and now you're obstinate.' For 
quick repartee in conversation, there are few things 
better. J. R." 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 165 

There are luckily no such scintillations of wit 
charged against Jeffrey, but the tradition concerning 
him gives him the highest reputation as an entertain- 
ing talker. He was not addicted to the telling of 
anecdotes or "stories," but was "bubbling over with 
engaging book-lore and poetic hypotheses, and eager 
to put them into those beautiful shapes of language 
which come — as easily as water flows — to his pen or 
to his tongue. * * * Q^e did not, after con- 
versing with him, recall great special aptness of re- 
mark or of epithet, so much as the charmingly even 
flow of apposite and illustrative language — void of all 
extravagances and of all wickedness too."* His bio- 
grarapher says of his conversation: 

"The listener's pleasure was enhanced by the per- 
sonal littleness of the speaker. A larger man could 
scarcely have thrown off Jeffrey's conversational flow- 
ers without exposing himself to ridicule. But the live- 
liness of the deep thoughts, and the flow of the bright 
expressions that animated his talk, seemed so natural 
and appropriate to the figure that uttered them, that 
they were heard with something of the delight with 
which the slenderness of the trembling throat and the 
quivering of the wings make us enjoy the strength 
and clearness of the notes of a little bird."t 

This description produces rather a belittling effect, 
reminding one of a canary bird in a cage, and it may 
be doubted if the subject of it would have relished 
it greatly. 

Haydon, writing to Miss Mitford from Edinburgh 
in 1820, is not as enthusiastic as some others, and re- 
marks that 



*Donald G. Mitchell, English Letters and Kings, 93. 
fLord Cockburn: Life, I, 364. 



1 66 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

^'Jeffrey has a singular expression, poignant, bitter, 
piercing— as if his countenance never Hghted up but at 
the perception of some weakness in human nature. 
Whatever your praise to Jeffrey, he directly chuckles 
out some error that you did not perceive. Whatever 
your praise to Scott, he joins heartily with yourself, 
and directs your attention to some additional beauty. 
The face of Scott is the expression of a man whose 
great pleasure has been to shake Nature by the hand; 
while to point at her with his finger, has certainly, 
from his expression, been the chief enjoyment of Jef- 

Richard Harris Barham records that Moore spoke 
of Jeffrey as an excellent judge, and remarked on the 
difference between his conversation and that of Scott; 
Scott was all anecdote, without any intermediate mat- 
ter, all fact, while Jeffrey had a profusion of ideas all 
worked up into the highest flight of fancy, but no 
fact. Moore preferred Scott's talk, as he got tired 
of Jeffrey's. 

One reason why different people had opposing opin- 
ions in regard to Jeffrey's personality and conversa- 
tion, is given by Macaulay in the letter to his mother 
from which a quotation has already been given, — a 
letter written with the power and vividness of expres- 
sion which marked not only his published work but 
even his private correspondence. He said: 

"I will commence with Jeffrey. I had almost for- 
gotten his person; and, indeed, I should not wonder 
if even now I were to forget it again. He has twen- 
ty faces, almost as much unlike each other as my 
father's to Mr. Wilberforce's, and infinitely more un- 
like to each other than those of near relations often 



*B. R. Haydon and His Friends, iii. 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 167 

are, infinitely more unlike, for example, than those of 
the two Grants. When absolutely quiescent, reading 
a paper, or hearing a conversation in which he takes 
no interest, his countenance shows no indication what- 
ever of intellectual superiority of any kind. But as 
soon as he is interested, and opens his eyes upon you, 
the change is like magic. There is a flash in his glance, 
a violent contortion in his frown, an exquisite humor 
In his sneer, and a sweetness and brilliancy in his smile, 
beyond anything that I ever witnessed. A person who 
had seen him in only one state would not know him if 
he saw him in another. For he has not, like Broug- 
ham, marked features which in all moods of mind re- 
main unaltered. The mere outline of his face is insig- 
nificant. The expression is everything, and such 
power and variety of expression I never saw in any 
human countenance, not even in that of the most cele- 
brated actors. I can conceive that Garrick may have 
been like him. I have seen several pictures of Gar- 
rick, none resembling another, and I have heard Han- 
nah More speak of the extraordinary variety of coun- 
tenance by which he was distinguished, and of the un- 
equalled radiance and penetration of his eye. The 
voice and delivery of Jeffrey resemble his face. He 
possesses considerable power of mimicry, and rarely 
tells a story without imitating several different accents. 
His familiar tone, his declamatory tone, and his pa- 
thetic tone are quite different things. Sometimes 
Scotch predominates in his pronunciation; sometimes 
it Is imperceptible. Sometimes his utterance is snap- 
pish and quick to the last degree; sometimes it is re- 
markable for rotundity and mellowness. I can easily 
conceive that two people who had seem him on differ- 
ent days might dispute about him as the travelers in 
the fable disputed about the chameleon." 

Mrs. Grant of Laggan, usually styled "the cele- 
brated," writes of a visit she received from Scott and 
Jeffrey: 



1 68 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"You would think that the body of each was formed 
to lodge the soul of the other. Jeffrey looks the poet 
all over: the ardent eye, the nervous agitation, the 
visibly quick perceptions keep one's attention awake 
in the expectation of flashes of genius; nor is that ex- 
pectation disappointed, for his conversation is in a 
high degree fluent and animated. Walter Scott has 
not a gleam of poetic fire in his countenance, which 
merely suggests the idea of plain good sense." 

She confessed that she was unable to refrain from 
liking "the archcritic" in spite of his manifold literary 
offenses. 

Macaulay thought his conversation very much like 
his countenance and his voice, of immense variety, 
sometimes plain and unpretending, sometimes brilliant 
and rhetorical; a shrewd observer, fastidious, and 
while not altogether free from affectation himself, hav- 
ing a peculiar loathing for it in other people. 

"He has a particular contempt" Macaulay adds "in 
which I most heartily concur with him, for the fadaises 
of blue-stocking literature, for the mutual flatteries of 
coteries, the handing about of vers de societe, the al- 
bums, the conversaziones, and all the other nauseous 
trickeries of the Sewards, Hayleys, and Sothebys. I 
am not quite sure that he has escaped the opposite ex- 
treme, and that he is not a little too desirous to ap- 
pear rather a man of the world, an active lawyer, or 
an easy, careless gentleman, than a distinguished 
writer." 

Macaulay thought him to be hypochondriac, but 
that he was "on the whole, the youngest looking man 
of fifty that I know, at least when he was animated." 
In 1828 when this was written, Jeffrey was fifty-five. 

Of his conversation, Hazlitt says in his Spirit of 
the Age : 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 169 

"There Is no subject on which he is not au fait: no 
company in which he is not ready to scatter his pearls 
for sport. * * * YWs only difficulty seems to be, 
not to speak, but to be silent. * * * ^e is never 
absurd, nor has he any favorite points which he Is 
always bringing forward. It cannot be denied that 
there is something bordering on petulance of manner, 
but it is of that least offensive kind which may be 
accounted for from merit and from success, and im- 
plies no exclusive pretensions nor the least particle of 
ill-will to others. On the contrary, Mr. Jeffrey is 
profuse of his encomiums and admiration of others, 
but still with a certain reservation of a right to differ 
or to blame. He cannot rest on one side of a ques- 
tion; he is obliged by a mercurial habit and disposi- 
tion, to vary his point of view. If he is ever tedious, 
it is from an excess of liveliness; he oppresses from 
a sense of airy lightness. He is always setting out on 
a fresh scent; there are always relays of topics. * * * 
New causes are called; he holds a brief in his hand 
for every possible question. This is a fault. Mr. 
Jeffrey is not obtrusive, is not impatient of opposition, 
is not unwilling to be interrupted; but what is said by 
another seems to make no impression on him; he is 
bound to dispute, to answer it, as if he was in Court, 
or as if he were in a paltry Debating Society, where 
young beginners were trying their hands. * * * 
He cannot help cross-examining a witness, or stating 
the adverse view of the question. He listens not to 
judge, but to reply. In consequence of this, you can 
as little tell the impression your observations make on 
him as what weight to assign to his." 

Most of us have met men who are like Jeffrey In 
these respects; usually they are the bright, clever, self- 
centered men, who consider themselves to be on exhi- 
bition. In talking with them, one can see at a glance 
that they are thinking not of what you are saying to 
them but of what they will say when you have paused. 



170 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

They are entertaining persons, but not always agree- 
able in conversation. 
Hazlitt further says: 

"Mr. Jeffrey shines in mixed company; he is not 
good in a tete-a-tete. You can only show your wis- 
dom and your wit in general society; but in private 
your follies or your weaknesses are not the least inter- 
esting topics; and our critic has neither any of his own 
to confess, nor does he take delight in hearing those 
of others. Indeed, in Scotland generally the display 
of personal character, the indulging your whims and 
humors in the presence of a friend is not much en- 
couraged — every one there is looked upon in the light 
of a machine, of a collection of topics. * * * 
The accomplished and ingenious person of whom we 
speak, has been a little infected by the tone of his 
countrymen — he is too didactic, too pugnacious, too 
full of electrical shocks, too much like a voltaic bat- 
tery, and reposes too little on his own excellent good 
sense, his own love of ease, his cordial frankness of 
temper and unaffected candor. He ought to have be- 
longed to us !" 

Lockhart is not quite as censorious as Hazlitt is, but 
then Lockhart had a more amiable disposition. He 
says, in "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk" : 

"I have never, I believe, heard so many ideas thrown 
out by any man in so short a space of time, and ap- 
parently with such entire negation of exertion. His 
conversation acted upon me like the first delightful 
hour after taking opium. The thoughts he scattered 
so readily about him (his words, rapid and wonder- 
fully rapid as they are, appearing to be continually 
panting after his conceptions) —his thoughts, I say, 
were at once so striking, and so just, that they took 
in succession entire possession of my imagination, and 
yet with so felicitous a tact did he forbear from ex- 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 171 

pressing any one of these too freely, that the reason 
was always kept in a pleasing kind of excitement, by 
the endeavor more thoroughly to examine their bear- 
ings. * * * J have heard some men display 
more profoundness of reflection, and others of a much 
greater command of the conversational picturesque — 
but I never before witnessed anything to be compared 
with the blending together of apparently little con- 
sistent powers in the whole strain of his discourse. 
Such a power, in the first place, of throwing away at 
once every useless part of the idea to be discussed, 
and then such a happy redundancy of imagination to 
present the essential and reserved part in its every 
possible relation, and point of view, — and all this con- 
nected with so much of the plain savoir faire of actual 
existence, and such a thorough scorn of mystification, 
it is really a very wonderful intellectual coalition." 

In the Reminiscences, Carlyle describes a scene in 
his own home at Craigenputtoch. 

''One of the nights there * * * encouraged 
possibly by the presence of poor James Anderson, an 
ingenious, simple, youngish man, and our nearest gen- 
tleman neighbor, Jeffrey in the drawing room was 
cleverer, brighter, and more amusing than I ever saw 
him elsewhere. We had got to talk of public speak- 
ing, of which Jeffrey had plenty to say, and found 
Anderson and all of us ready enough to hear. Be- 
fore long he fell into mimicking of public speakers, 
men unknown, perhaps imaginary generic specimens; 
and did it with such a felicity, flowing readiness, in- 
genuity, and perfection of imitation as I never saw 
equalled, and had not given him credit for before. 
Our cozy little drawing room, bright-shining, hidden 
in the lowly wilderness, how beautiful it looked to us, 
become suddenly as it were a Temple of the Muses! 
The little man strutted about full of electric fire, with 
attitudes, with gesticulations, still more with winged 
words, often broken-winged, amid our admiring laugh- 



172 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

ter; gave us the windy, grandiloquent specimen, the 
ponderous stupid, the airy ditto, various specimens, as 
the talk, chiefly his own, spontaneously suggested, of 
which there was a little preparatory interstice between 
each two. And the mimicry was so complete, you 
would have said not his mind only, but his very body 
became the specimens, his face filled with the expres- 
sion represented, and his little figure seeming to grow 
gigantic if the personage required it. At length he 
gave us the abstruse costive specimen, which had a 
meaning and no utterance for it, but went about clam- 
bering, stumbling, as on a path of loose bowlders, and 
ended in total down-break, amid peals of the heartiest 
laughter from us all. This of the aerial little sprite 
standing there in fatal collapse, with the brightest of 
eyes sternly gazing into utter nothingness and dumb- 
ness, was one of the most tickling and genially ludic- 
rous things I ever saw, and it prettily winded up our 
little drama." 



VI. 



Robert Pearse Gillies, that odd, unlucky, obscure 
aspirant for honor as a poet and an editor, has left in 
his book of recollections an account of Jeffrey which 
exaggerates certain traits and must have been written 
as of a time when the "little great man," as Hazlitt 
calls him, was still young and perhaps a bachelor. He 
says: 

"Among the public characters who were always to 
be met with at our balls and routs in those days, out 
of sight and comparison the most distinguished was 
Mr. Jeffrey. To every one who appreciated his tal- 
ents, the wonder was how he could reconcile his mode 
of life in this respect with his literary and professional 
engagement. But that he did so was very certain. 
He seemed the gayest of the gay. He was invited 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 173 

everywhere, tried to make his appearance everywhere, 
and on all such occasions his popularity (if possible) 
increased. * * * Yo all appearances he cared 
not a rush about habits of consecutive application. 
No one could guess what portion of his day was ap- 
propriated to literary tasks nor indeed could have 
imagined that he really had any such tasks on hand. 
In the mornings, from nine till two, he was on parade 
and professionally employed in the Parliament House. 
Thereafter, till dinner time, weather permitting, he 
walked out or promenaded on horseback. Never did 
it happen for a single day during the season, that he 
had not divers invitations both for dinner and even- 
ing parties. Of the former, it is needless to say, he 
could accept only one per diem; but it was quite pos- 
sible during the evening, to migrate from one rout to 
another, and this he often did, winding up, of course, 
where the supper party was most attractive and con- 
genial." 

Referring to Dugald Stewart and Sir Walter Scott, 
their quiet homes and orderly libraries, he continues : 

"Never did any fox-hunter or wild roue trample 
more disdainfully on all such notions than Mr. Jef- 
frey! He had third-rate apartments in a 'land' situ- 
ated in Queen Street, where exclusive of the necessary 
law books and the very newest publications, his entire 
library consisted of a few motley tatterdemalion vol- 
umes, for all the world likest to a set of worn out 
school books, and such perhaps they really were. 
Truly there appeared no great charm in that home to 
render it an object of attachment and affection. Its 
arrangements were not symmetrical nor indicated much 
attention to comfort. The looking-glass over the 
chimney piece remains yet in my remembrance, be- 
cause within and under its tarnished frame were lo- 
cated a preposterous multitude of visiting cards and 
notes of invitation which showered on him from all 
quarters, 'thick as the leaves in Vallambrosa'." 



174 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

Jeffrey did not occupy a "third-rate apartment in 
Queen Street" after his marriage, and it is quite ab- 
surd to found a judgment upon a man's whole life, on 
a mode of living as a young bachelor. But even Gil- 
lies, — a little envious — cannot withhold a slight tribu- 
ute of praise. He goes on to say: 

"From all this and other traits which I might ad- 
duce, who could have imagined that the gay, young 
barrister was in truth the most adventurous and suc- 
cessful student in town, the very man of all our 
Athenian world who was most ready and able to grap- 
ple with a difficult question, to torture and twist it by 
the process of analysis and reasoning, till gleams of 
light the most unexpected were thrown upon the sub- 
ject, and who when his reader or hearer thought that 
no more could possibly be done, would start again de 
novo, not merely with unabated but increased vivacity, 
adding more and more of patient argument and bril- 
liant illustration, till at last a so-called essay (alias 
review) came forth, comprising materials that might 
serve as texts for future volumes. 

"This was not comprehensible yet was nevertheless 
true — when did he elaborate his papers? There was 
only one way of accounting for it — the old suggestion 
as applied in the case of Chatterton, that he did not 
sleep, but could betake himself to work with undi- 
minished zeal when the day's work of the world was 
done. It would be rather too hypothetical to suppose 
that he possessed a duality of mind, and could persist 
in arranging silently a critical argument with one, 
whilst with the other he managed a nonsensical con- 
versation at the supper table. However, there was 
one leading peculiarity in Jeffrey's character, which 
perhaps rendered time of some value in his case, that 
would otherwise have been lost; I mean the grace and 
alacrity wherewith, if opportunity offered, he could 
turn ordinary conversation to account. If the most 
commonplace remark was tendered on a subject in 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 175 

itself interesting, he would rapidly reply with an il- 
lustration as original as it was unexpected. And if 
his superficial neighbor luckily ventured to differ from 
him in opinion, then he would rouse and present the 
matter in a hundred new lights (if needful) so as to 
carry his point. And this argument taking its rise, 
perhaps, from a mere platitude in the course of ordin- 
ary table-talk, or during a walk to Corstorphin Hill, 
might dwell on his remembrance and if committed af- 
terwards to writing, serve for the commencement of a 
leading article." 

These diffuse and somewhat rambling remarks of 
Gillies have been given so fully because they afford a 
portrait of the real Jeffrey as he appeared to his con- 
temporaries in his younger days, and throw much light 
on his methods as they were before he attained celeb- 
rity outside of the narrow walls of the Scotch '* Athens." 
These methods were never wholly abandoned, and the 
result has been that what he wrote often conveys an 
impression that he has not penetrated to the core of his 
subject, but is playing around and about it with no set- 
tled convictions and no wish to have any such convic- 
tions concerning it. Naturally writings of this kind 
have no permanence of interest, and soon become part 
of the lumber of the past, read only by some curious 
burrower in literary history. But the man, Jeffrey, 
will be read of and remembered although his once- 
dreaded reviews may have gone the way of most of the 
ephemeral pages of the magazine. 

Hazlitt certainly knew him well, and had abundant 
occasion to experience the benefit of his generous friend- 
ship. In the Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt further says of 
him: 

"The severest of critics, as he has been sometimes 
termed, is the best natured of men. Whatever there 



176 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

may be of wavering or indecision in Mr. Jeffrey's rea- 
soning, or of harshness in his critical decisions, in his 
disposition there is nothing but simplicity and kind- 
ness. He is a person that no one knows without es- 
teeming, and who both in his public connections and 
private friendships, shows the same manly upright- 
ness and unbiassed independence of spirit. At a dis- 
tance, in his writings, or even in his manner, there may 
be something to excite a little uneasiness and appre- 
hension; in his conduct, there is nothing to except 
against. He is a person of strict integrity himself, 
without pretence or affectation; and knows how to re- 
spect this quality in others, without prudery or intol- 
erance. He can censure a friend or a stranger, and 
serve him effectually at the same time. He expresses 
his disapprobation, but not as an excuse for closing up 
the avenues of his liberality. He is a Scotchman with- 
out one particle of hypocrisy, of cant, of servility, or 
selfishness in his composition. He has not been spoiled 
by fortune — has not been tempted by power — is firm 
without violence, friendly without weakness — a critic 
and even-tempered, a casuist and an honest man — and 
amidst the toils of his profession and the distractions 
of the world, retains the gayety, the unpretending 
carelessness, and simplicity of youth.'' 

In Macvey Napier's Correspondence (London, 
1879) he quotes Macaulay as saying, in 1843: 

"When I compare him with Sydney and myself, I 
feel, with humility perfectly sincere, that his range is 
immeasurably wider than ours. And this is only as a 
writer. But he is not only a writer; he has been a 
great advocate, and he is a great judge. Take him 
all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius 
than any man of our time. * * * Jeffrey has 
tried nothing in which he has not succeeded, except 
Parliamentary speaking; and there he obtained what 
to any other man would have been great success, and 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 177 

disappointed his hearers only because their expecta- 
tions were extravagant." 

Doctor John Brown, in Horae Subsecivae, speaks 
of 

"Jeffrey, whom flattery, success, and himself cannot 
spoil, or taint that sweet, generous nature — keen, in- 
stant, unsparing, and true as a rapier; the most pains- 
taking and honest working of all clever men." 



VII 



We have observed that in his earlier years at the 
bar he had but little practice. His lack of early suc- 
cess has been ascribed partly to his Whig opinions; 
but they could not have done him any serious harm. 
It has also been said to be due to the general preju- 
dice against literary lawyers. This prejudice may 
have had something to do with it; for clients are in- 
clined to believe that their lawyer should not think of 
anything but their affairs and their cases and resent 
devotion to any shrines but their own. The law is 
proverbially a jealous mistress, but clients are even 
more jealous masters. When a man has won a repu- 
tation as a lawyer he may perhaps by way of digres- 
sion, a holiday excursion, dabble in literature; but not 
till then. If he makes a business of literary work, he 
must give up hope of eminence in the field of juris- 
prudence. After he has gained a name in his pro- 
fession, his dabblings are never regarded seriously. 
Still, Jeffrey began to rise as a lawyer after he be- 
came known as an editor and a reviewer. He was 
at his best before juries, as may well be supposed, 



178 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

for jurymen care very little about profundities and a 
good deal about things that shine brightly on the sur- 
face. 

The Monthly Magazine said of him, as a lawyer: 

"When once he had made himself master of a case 
and its bearings, he was always ready to debate it, 
even at a moment's warning, however heterogeneous 
the subject to which he had been tasking his faculties 
the moment before. This might be owing to a habit 
which he had in previous conversations with the party 
or his agent, to ply them with all the arguments that 
could be brought against them. Often have we known 
an honest countryman, perplexed by his objections, re- 
monstrate with his attorney for having encouraged 
him to proceed with a hopeless case, or for having 
employed a pleader of so desponding a temperament; 
and immediately thereafter have we seen his honest 
face grow momentarily broader and broader, brighter 
and brighter, as Jeffrey, on stepping to the bar, pro- 
ceeded to demonstrate his right in a train of the closest 
and most irrefragable reasoning." 

One is amused and not displeased at the fact that, 
as he found trouble in adjusting his forensic wig over his 
black, bushy hair, he never wore a wig in court and was 
for many years the only lawyer at the Scottish bar who 
dared to dispense with that ornament. Despite this de- 
fiance of professional custom, he became a leader in the 
courts. He did excellent work in the trial of Maclaren 
and Bird for sedition in 1817, and again in sedition 
cases at Stirling in 1820, although he lost his causes. 
In 182 1 he was made Lord Rector of the University of 
Glasgow. When the Whigs came into power in 1830 
he was made Lord Advocate. Carlyle writes in his 
Note Book about that time : 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 179 

^'Jeffrey is Lord Advocate and M. P. Sobbed and 
shrieked at taking office, like a bride going to be mar- 
ried." 

He may have shown some emotion but his cross- 
grained friend, who was given to thinking and writing 
in italics and with over-abundant exclamation points, 
probably exaggerated it. Jeffrey resigned his deanship 
and he set to work to get the necessary seat in Parlia- 
ment. Cockburn notes that the income of his new of- 
fice was about £3000 a year, but between December, 
1830 and May, 1832, he spent about £10,000 in par- 
liamentary contests. Elected for the Forfarshire 
burghs, he lost his seat through some defect in the pro- 
ceedings, and was then chosen, April 6, 183 1, for Mal- 
ton. He failed of election for Edinburgh and was in 
June again elected for Malton. After the Reform 
Bill was passed he stood again for Edinburgh, and 
was elected December 19, 1832. He did not achieve 
much success in Parliament, for he began too late. He 
was never an orator, although in what he said he was 
^'always clean-cut, sensible, picturesque, flowing smooth- 
ly, but rather on the surface of things than into their 
depths." Mackintosh* spoke favorably of the speech 
on reform which he delivered on March 4, 1831, and 
it was published "at the special request of government." 
He made other speeches which were well regarded, but 
they were rather essays than speeches. 

Brougham in his Memoirs says, however: 

*'It was the custom to say he had failed in Parlia- 
ment. I recollect meeting Sir Robert Peel the night 
he made his first speech; and in answer to my inquiry 



*Memoirs, 1 1 : 479. 



i8o EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

as to its success, he said that Jeffrey had fired over 
their heads, and was too clever for his audience." 

If one may judge of the House of Commons of that 
day by the House of the present, it could not have 
been difficult to accomplish that feat. 

He was hampered by a distressing infirmity, suffer- 
ing greatly from an affection of the trachea, and was 
obliged to undergo an operation in October, 1831. He 
grew weary of his tasks, and while he preserved his 
good temper and conciliatory ways, he found much of 
the work quite distasteful. 

Hazlitt in his Spirit of the Age gives a description 
of Jeffrey's style of speaking. He says: 

"He makes fewer blots in addressing an audience 
than any one we remember to have heard. There is 
not a hairbreadth space between any two of his 
words, nor is there a single expression either ill- 
chosen or out of place. He speaks without stopping 
to take breath, with ease, with point, with elegance, 
and without 'spinning the thread of his verbosity finer 
than the staple of his argument.' He may be said to 
weave words into any shapes he pleases for use or 
ornament, as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid 
with his breath, and his sentences shine like glass 
from their polished smoothness, and are equally trans- 
parent. * * * Whenever the Scotch advocate 
has appeared at the bar of the English House of 
Lords, he has been admired by those who were in the 
habit of attending to speeches there, as having the 
greatest fluency of language and the greatest subtlety 
of distinction of any one of the profession. The law- 
reporters were as little able to follow him from the 
extreme rapidity of his utterance as from the tenuity 
and evanescent nature of his reasoning." 

The article of the New Monthly Magazine, ( 1 83 1 ) , 
says: 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER i8i 

"His delivery is not commanding — that, his figure 
forbids — but it is fascinating. He rises, settles his 
gown about his shoulders, and commences in a low 
tone of voice. For the first two or three sentences, 
he seems beating about for ideas — words there are 
plenty. But he soon comes upon the track. With 
the side of his face turned towards the person or per- 
sons he is addressing, he fixes his serpent eye upon 
them and holds them fast. At one time he leans for- 
ward and speaks in tones as harsh as the grating of 
an earthenware plate upon a working grindstone; again 
he stands erect, or even casts himself backward, and 
without any sensible motion of his lips, emits a continu- 
ous stream of most melodious voice." 

Lockhart in Peter^s Letters to his Kinsfolk, (1819), 
remarks of Jeffrey's oratory: 

"I have told you in a former letter that his pronun- 
ciation is wretched — it is a mixture of provincial Eng- 
lish, with undignified Scotch, altogether snappish and 
offensive, and which would be quite sufficient to render 
the elocution of a more ordinary man utterly disgust- 
ing; but the flow of his eloquence is so overpoweringly 
rapid, so unweariedly energetic, so entirely unlike every 
other man's mode of speaking, that the pronunciation 
of the particular words is quite lost to one's view, in 
the midst of that continual effort which is required, in 
order to make the understanding, even the ear of the 
listener, keep pace with the glowing velocity of the 
declamation. His words come more profusely than 
words ever came before, and yet it seems as if they were 
quite unable to follow, passihus aequis, the still more 
amazing speed of his thought. You sit, while minute 
follows minute uncounted and unheeded, in a state of 
painful excitation, as if you were in a room overlighted 
with gas, or close under the crash of a whole pealing 
orchestra. 

''This astonishing fluency and vivacity, if possessed 
by a person of very inferior talents, might for a little 



1 82 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

be sufficient to create an illusion In his favor; and I 
have heard that such things have been. But the more 
you can overcome the effect of Mr. Jeffrey's dazzling 
rapidity, and concentrate your attention on the Ideas 
embodied with such supernatural facility, the greater 
will be your admiration. It Is Impossible to conceive 
the existence of a more fertile, teeming intellect. The 
flood of his Illustration seems to be at all times rioting 
up to the very brim — yet he commands and restrains It 
with equal strength and skill; or, If It does boil over for 
a moment. It spreads such a richness all around, that it 
is Impossible to find fault with Its extravagance. * 

* * If he be not the most delightful, he Is cer- 
tainly by far the most wonderful of speakers." 

James Grant, In Random Recollections, referring 
to Jeffrey's first speech In Parliament, 1831, says: 

"The amazing rapidity of his delivery operated 
much against his speech. I think I never heard a per- 
son, either in or out of the House, speak so fast as he 
did on that occasion. The most experienced short-hand 
reporters were unable to follow him. * * * Yet, 
notwithstanding the rapidity with which Mr. Jeffrey 
spoke on this occasion, he never so much as faltered 
once, nor recalled a word which he uttered to substi- 
tute one more suitable for It. His manner * * * 
was graceful, but it wanted variety. His voice was 
clear and pleasant; but It had no flexibility in its into- 
nations. He continued and ended In much the same 
tones as he began. The same monotony characterized 
his gesticulation." 

VIII 

Glad to be relieved of parliamentary drudgery, he 
became a Lord of the Sessions In May, 1834, and 
after a farewell dinner had been given to him by the 
Scottish members, he assumed his judicial seat on 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 183 

June 7, 1834, and thus acquired his title of "Lord Jef- 
frey," for he never reached the peerage. He usually 
passed his winters in Edinburgh, and his summers at 
Craigcrook, visiting London in the spring. In the 
summers he occupied himself in his garden and in 
reading. Sir Leslie Stephen says: 

''He was a sloven in regard to books, and had a 
'wretched collection,' though in a 'moment of infir- 
mity' he joined the Bannatyne Club in 1826. He had 
been one of the founders of the 'Friday Club,' in 
1803, which endured for more than thirty years." 

As a judge he gave great satisfaction, showing the 
same qualities of tact, quickness and accuracy which 
marked his career at the bar and in the world of let- 
ters. In 1 84 1 he had a serious illness, from the ef- 
fects of which he never entirely recovered. In No- 
vember, 1842, he became a member of the first divi- 
sion of the court, where he had three associates and 
where the opinions were oral. Cockburn asserts that 
he was singularly patient, painstaking and candid. 
His fault was over-volubility and mutability, which 
led him to interpose a 'running margin of questions, 
suppositions and comments' throughout the argu- 
ment. But his urbanity and openness of mind made 
him exceedingly popular, especially with the bar.* 
Some men are so constituted mentally that they are 
unable to comprehend an argument except by inter- 
rupting the counsel and satisfying themselves as the 
hearing proceeds, in regard to the questions which oc- 
cur to them at the moment. Such judges annoy and 
disconcert lawyers, because they disturb the or- 
derly sequence of the argument and their fidgety 



^Dictionary of National Biography, xxix, 275. 



1 84 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

queries bring about a sort of medley, without form 
or shape, instead of a well-arranged presentation 
of the subject under consideration. In this way 
time is often wasted and real injustice done. 
All sound lawyers welcome questions by the 
court arising naturally out of the particular mat- 
ter with which they may happen to be dealing, but 
it is otherwise when a nimble minded, restless judge 
insists upon darting from the point immediately un- 
der consideration to some remote field, which is to be 
entered upon later. The judge who talks too much 
is as unsatisfactory as the one who never opens his 
lips and listens with blank stolidity. Jeffrey's per- 
sonal charm, however, endeared him to all who prac- 
tised before him. 

Many of his contemporaries dwell upon his person- 
ality, his appearance, and his manners. The author 
of the paper in the New Monthly Magazine (1831), 
to which reference has been made, thus describes 
him: 

*'He is of low stature, but his figure is elegant and 
well proportioned. This he seems to be aware of from 
the assiduity with which he takes care that his little per- 
sonage shall always be set out to the best advantage. 
The continually varying expression of his countenance 
renders it impossible to say what his features are. * 

* * The face is rather elongated, the chin de- 
ficient, the mouth well-formed, with a mingled expres- 
sion of determination, sentiment and arch-mockery; the 
nose Is slightly curved. * * * Xhe brow never 
presents the same appearance for two moments succes- 
sively; It Is now smooth and unfurrowed, lofty and 
vaulted; look again, and the skin is contracted up- 
wards Into a thousand parallel wrinkles, offering the 
semblance of a 'forehead villainous low.' The eye is 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 185 

the most peculiar feature of the countenance ; it is large 
and sparkling, but with a want of transparency that 
gives it the appearance of a heartless enigma." 

Lockhart says of him, in Peter's Letters to his Kins- 
folk: 

'*It is a face which any man would pass without ob- 
servation in a crowd, because it is small and swarthy, 
and entirely devoid of lofty or commanding outlines — 
and besides, his stature is so low, that he might walk 
close under your chin or mine without ever catching the 
eye even for a moment. 

"Mr. Jeffrey * * * is a very active-looking 
man, with an appearance of extraordinary vivacity in 
all his motions and gestures. His face is one which 
cannot be understood at a single look — perhaps it re- 
quires, as it certainly invites, a long and anxious scru- 
tiny before it lays itself open to the gazer. The feat- 
tures are neither handsome, nor even very defined in 
their outlines; and yet the effect of the whole is as 
striking as any arrangement either of more noble or 
more marked features, which ever came under my view. 
The forehead is very singularly shaped, describing in 
its bend from side to side a larger segment of a circle 
than is at all common; compressed below the temples 
almost as much as Sterne's; and throwing out sinuses 
above the eyes, of an extremely bold and compact struc- 
tures The hair is very black and wiry, standing in rag- 
ged, bristly clumps out from the upper part of his head, 
but lying close and firm lower down, especially about the 
ears. Altogether, it is picturesque, and adds to the 
effect of the visage. The mouth is the most expres- 
sive part of his face. The lips are very fine, but they 
tremble and vibrate, even when brought close together, 
in such a way as to give the idea of an intense, never- 
ceasing play of mind. There is a delicate kind of sneer 
almost always upon them, which has not the least ap- 
pearance of ill-temper about it, but seems to belong en- 
tirely to the speculative understanding of the man. 



1 86 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

"I have said that the mouth is the most expressive 
part of his face — and, in one sense, this is the truth, for 
it is certainly the seat of all its rapid and transitory 
expression. But what speaking things are his eyes ! 
They disdain to be agitated by those lesser emotions 
which pass over the lips; they reserve their fierce and 
dark energies for matters of more moment; once kin- 
dled with the heat of any passion, how they beam, 
flash upon flash ! The scintillation of a star is not more 
fervid. Perhaps, notwithstanding this, their repose is 
even more worthy of attention. With the capacity of 
emitting such a flood of radiance, they seem to take a 
pleasure in banishing every ray from their black, in- 
scrutable, glazed, tarn-like circles. I think their pre- 
vailing language is, after all, rather a melancholy than 
a merry one — it is, at least, very full of reflection. Such 
is a faint outline of this countenance, the features of 
which (to say nothing at all of their expression), have, 
as yet, baffled every attempt of the portrait painters. 

* * * A sharp, and at the same time, very deep- 
toned voice — a very bad pronunciation, but accompa- 
nied with very little of the Scotch accent — a light and 
careless manner exchanged now and then for an infinite 
variety of more earnest expression and address — this 
is as much as I could carry away from my first visit." 

Dr. John Brown in his Horae Suhsecivae (Third 
Series, Edinburgh, 1882) said of Jeffrey's mouth that 
it was "mobile and yet firm, arch, and kind, with a 
beautiful procacity or petulance about it, that you 
would not like absent in him, or present in any one else." 

Robert Tomes in My College Days writes of him : 

"I often peeped through the green curtain which 
hung before his contracted judicial shell, and watched 
the wondrous little man unravelling, in his quick, im- 
patient way, the tangle of Scotch law. His restless per- 
son was in a state of perpetual movement; his eyes- 
turning here, there, and everywhere; his features at 
constant play; his forehead rippling in quick succes- 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 187 

sive wrinkles as if trying to throw ojfi his close-fitting 
judicial wig, which seemed to grasp his diminutive head 
painfully, almost down to his eyebrows, and with its 
great stiff curls of white horse-hair heavily to oppress 
him with its weight. His arms, too, he was ever mov- 
ing with an uneasy action, as if he would rid himself of 
the incumbrance of his official robe of scarlet, which 
covered his shoulders, and hung in loose folds from his 
neck to his wrists." 

Carlyle in his Reminiscences gives a vivid pen-pic- 
ture of him, as he was apt to do when he dealt with 
those who interested him : 

"A delicate, attractive, dainty little figure as he mere- 
ly walked about, much more if he were speaking, un- 
commonly bright black eyes, instinct with vivacity, in- 
telligence, and kindly fire; round brow, delicate oval 
face full of rapid expression, figure light, nimble, pret- 
ty though so small, perhaps hardly five feet in height. 
He had his gown, almost never any wig, wore his 
black hair rather closely cropt; I have seen the back 
part of it jerk suddenly out in some of the rapid ex- 
pressions of his face, and knew even if behind him 
that his brow was then puckered, and his eyes looking 
archly, half contemptously out, in conformity to some 
conclusive little cut his tongue was giving." 

Elsewhere Carlyle says: 

"His accent was * * * singular, but it was by 
no means Scotch; at his first going to Oxford (where 
he did not stay long) he had peremptorily crushed 
down his Scotch (which he privately had in store in 
excellent condition to the very end of his life, produci- 
ble with highly ludicrous effect on occasion), and adopt- 
ed instead a strange, swift, sharp-sounding, fitful mo- 
dulation, part of it pungent, quasi-labrant, other parts 
of it cooing, bantery, lovingly quizzical, which no 
charms of his fine ringing voice (metallic tenor of sweet 
tone), and of his vivacious rapid looks, and pretty lit- 



1 88 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

tie atttludes and gestures, could not altogether reconcile 
you to, but In which he persisted through good report 
and bad. Old Braxey (Macqueen, Lord Braxfield), a 
sad old cynic, on whom Jeffrey used to set one laugh- 
ing often enough, was commonly reported to have said, 
on hearing Jeffrey again after that Oxford sojourn, 
'The laddie has clean tint his Scotch, and found nae 
English!' which was an exaggerative reading of the 
fact, his words and syllables being elaborately Eng- 
lish (or English and more, e. g., 'heppy,' 'my lud,' 
etc., etc.), while the tune he sang them to was all his 
own." 

"His voice," says Carlyle, "clear, harmonious, and 
sonorous, had something of metallic in it, something 
almost plangent; never rose into alt, into any dis- 
sonance of shrillness, nor carried much the character 
of humor, though a fine feeling of the ludicrous al- 
ways dwelt in him, as you would notice best when he 
got into Scotch dialect, and gave you, with admirable 
truth of mimicry, old Edinburgh incidents and experi- 
ences of his. * * * Y^As laugh was small and 
by no means Homeric; he never laughed loud (could 
not do it I should think) , and indeed often sniggered 
slightly than laughed in any way." 

Lord Cockburn is almost interesting in his descrip- 
tion of the voice: 

"His voice was distinct and silvery; so clear and 
precise that when in good order, it was heard above 
a world of discordant sounds. The utterance was 
excessively rapid; but without spluttering, slurring, 
or confusion; and regulated Into deliberate emphasis, 
whenever this was proper. The velocity of the cur- 
rent was not more remarkable than its purity and 
richness. His command of language was unlimited." 

Charles Pebody, in the Gentleman's Magazine, 
June, 1870, writes: 

"He never took up his pen till the candles were lit. 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 189 

* * * He did most of his work in those fatal 
hours of inspiration from ten at night till two or three 
o'clock in the morning. * * * ^jg manuscript 
was inexpressibly vile; for he wrote with great haste, 

* * * generally used a wretched pen, * * * 
and altered, erased, and interlined without the slight- 
est thought of the printer or his correspondent. 

* * * The explanation is, of course, the usual one 
with men of Jeffrey's temperament and genius. He 
had a horror and hatred of the work of the desk. 

* * * His favorite hours of reading were in the 
morning and in bed, unless he had to deal with a 
subject of peculiar dignity, and in that case he read it 
up * * * at night; for he had a notion that 
hints and suggestions, facts and thoughts, illustrations 
and authorities, picked up promiscuously over-night, 
assorted themselves in sleep round their proper cen- 
tres, and thus reappeared in the morning in logical 
order." 

Samuel Carter Hall, that diffuse, conceited and 
prosy hanger-on upon the outskirts of literature, 
seems to have forgotten his usual good-nature — which 
alone renders him endurable — in his observations about 
Jeffrey, but he admits that he did not know him very 
well. 

"The far-famed editor of the Edinburgh Review 
had a few friends — firm and staunch and loving 
friends, and very many foes. Some of them he wil- 
fully and wantonly made so; others he did not under- 
stand, and therefore misrepresented; others he rightly 
and conscientiously condemned, and soured into bit- 
ter and irrational hostility." 

He further says: 

"No doubt he was a bitter, caustic and often unjust 
critic; and during his long career of power there were 
not many cases wherein he exhibited generosity and 



190 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

consideration, or that far-seeing intelligence which 
can anticipate and augur good as well as bad in the 
authors tried at his tribunal." 

Jeffrey must at some time have treated Mr. Hall as 
the humbug he really was; the assertion that he had "a 
few friends" is absurdly inane and groundless; but then 
Hall was a fat-headed person, whose attempts to iden- 
tify himself with the great men whom he happened to 
meet in a long life of pottering about literature and 
art have not sufficed to preserve his name in the mem- 
ory of posterity. 

IX. 

All — or nearly all — those who have left their testi- 
mony concerning him have dwelt upon his gentle and 
kindly nature. It is true that Lockhart, who naturally 
could not lose an opportunity of exalting Scott, quotes 
from a letter this quite ill-natured comparison : 

"Jeffrey for the most part entertained us, when 
books were under discussion, with the detection of 
faults, blunders, absurdities, or plagiarisms. Scott 
took up the matter where he left it, recalled some 
compensating beauty or excellence for which no credit 
had been allowed, and by the recitation, perhaps, of 
one fine stanza, set the poor victim on his legs again." 

The obvious implication is, that a poet — for it is 
plain that they were talking of poetry — may blunder, 
steal and be as absurd as he likes, but no one may speak 
of it if he has happened to write "one fine stanza." 

One trait he possessed which many will accept as 
competent evidence of his sweetness of disposition, de- 
spite his occasional worrying of poor poets — his fond- 
ness for animals. Lord Cockburn says: 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 191 

*'The only friend, besides his wife, daughter, and 
servants, that he took with him (to London) was one 
he often mentions, 'Poor Poll,' a gray and very wise 
parrot. He was attached to all that sort of domestic 
companions, and submitted to much taunts on account 
of the soft travelling-basket for the little dog, 'Witch,' 
and the large cage for his bird. The hearth rug and 
the sofa were seldom free of his dumb pets." 

He failed perceptibly about ten years before his 
death. In one of his charming letters to Miss Berry, 
given in her "Journal," he writes (1842) : 

"Though the trachea is at this moment my most 
urgent malady, the most obstinate and formidable is 
in another quarter, and one with which you are un- 
fortunately but too well acquainted. You and I should 
be in a very tolerable condition if it were not for that 
frigidus circum praecordia sanguis, though I confess 
I should scarcely have expected that our hearts should 
be the first things that failed about us, and (pri- 
vately) take it rather amiss."* 

Although his health declined, he did not become 
morose or discouraged, but he maintained his interest 
in books and his fondness for his family while con- 
tinuing his judicial labors almost without intermission. 
Stephen refers to "his kindly old age, when he could 
hardly have spoken sharply of a Lake poet." He was 
especially fond of Dickens, and his letters of appre- 
ciation are enthusiastic; he wept over Little Nell and 
Paul Dombey; and the son-in-law of Thackeray, 
while saying with what seems to be unnecessary con- 
temptuousness that "the emotion is a little senile," 
admits that at least it was genuine. He revised the 
proof sheets of the first two volumes of Macaulay's 



^Miss Berry's Journal (1865), ili. 475. 



192 . EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

History, priding himself greatly upon his accuracy in 
the matter of punctuation. Hugh Miller, in his Es- 
says (1862) refers to his remarkable energy when he 
was approaching the end. 

"All accounts agree," says Miller, "in representing 
him as in private life one of the kindest and gentlest 
of mortals, ever surrounded by the aroma of a deli- 
cate sense of honor and a transparent truthfulness, 
equable in temper, in conversation full of a playful 
ease, and, with even his ordinary talk, ever glittering 
in an unpremeditated wit 'that loved to play, not 
wound.' Never was there a man more thoroughly 
beloved by his friends. Though his term of life ex- 
ceeded the allotted three score and ten years, his fine 
intellect * * * ^^g ^q ^\^q \^^^ untouched by 
decay. Only four days previous to that of his death 
he sat upon the bench; only a few months ago he fin- 
ished an article for his old Review distinguished by 
all the nice discernment and acumen of his most vig- 
orous days. It is further gratifying to know, that 
though infected in youth and middle age by the wide- 
spread infidelity of the first French revolution, he was 
for at least the last few years of his life of a differ- 
ent spirit. He read much and often in his Bible; and 
he is said to have studied especially, and with much 
solicitude, the writings of St. Paul." 

His death occurred at Craigcrook, on January 26, 
1850. Empson, who married Jeffrey's only daughter, 
Charlotte, in 1838, and who succeeded Napier as 
editor of the Edinburgh in 1847, wrote on the 28th to 
Samuel Rogers : 

"A three days' illness, apparently slight in its 
causes and symptoms, deprived us, at six o'clock, on 
Saturday evening, of our dear friend. Millar was 
not alarmed, nor Christison, until four and twenty 
hours before his death. He suffered no pain, but 
from the sense of increasing weakness. Wine and 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 193 

brandy (he took nothing else) had no effect on his 
pulse or system. What there was of illness was a 
feverish cold, accompanied by a slight bronchial 
cough.'* 

It was simply a case of a wearing out of the 
heart. On the 31st he was buried in the Dean Ceme- 
tery near Edinburgh. 

Walter Bagehot's article in the National Review 
of October, 1855, on "The First Edinburgh Review- 
ers," gives us a pleasant, kindly, and discriminating 
opinion in regard to Jeffrey. Referring to his literary 
work, he says : 

"Any one who should expect to find a pure perfec- 
tion in these miscellaneous productions should remem- 
ber their bulk. If all his reviews were reprinted they 
would be very many. And all the while he was a 
busy lawyer, was editor of the Review, did the busi- 
ness, corrected the proof sheets; and more than all — 
what one would have thought a very strong man's 
work — actually managed Henry Brougham. You 
must not criticise papers like these, rapidly written in 
a hurry of life, as you would the painful words of an 
elaborate sage, slowly and with anxious carefulness 
instructing mankind. * * * ^it was neither a 
pathetic writer nor a profound writer; but he was 
a quick-eyed, bustling, black-haired, sagacious, agree- 
able man of the world. He had his day, and was 
entitled to his day; but a gentle oblivion must now 
cover his already subsiding reputation." 

Does not the same "gentle oblivion" cover the repu- 
tation of all writers who are not great creators? 

Sir Leslie Stephen, in the National Dictionary of 
Biography, presents a fair and scholarly estimate of 
the career and the character of Jeffrey, and writing 
a generation after the Bagehot review, seems to give 



194 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

to the critic and lawyer a rank somewhat higher than 
Bagehot is inclined to bestow. 

"If he had been less afraid of making blunders," 
Stephen remarks, "and trusted his natural instincts, 
he would have left a more permanent reputation, and 
achieved a less negative result." 

Dr. Winchester is not too partial to Jeffrey, but 
he closes his discussion of the merits of the reviewer 
with some words of commendation. 

"In briefest summary, then," he says, "we may ad- 
mit that to Jeffrey, rather than to any other man, may 
be given the credit of raising the critical essay to the 
rank of a recognized literary form; that his writing 
is always brilliant and plausible, that his critical ver- 
dicts are always clear, and if upon matters within the 
range of his appreciation, sensible and just. On the 
other hand, it must also be admitted that his range of 
appreciation is limited; that his impressions are of- 
ten worth more than the dogmas he invents to justify 
them; and that a considerable part of his fame was 
due to the immense and novel popularity of the Re- 
view, which raised him for a time to literary dictator- 
ship almost like that of Dryden or Johnson." 

It has been charged against him that he was with- 
out enthusiasm in his politics, despondent, pessimistic; 
prone to alarm for his country and for the interests of 
the landed proprietors; that he was indifferent to the 
development of new forces; that he belonged to a class 
of men who "detest enthusiasm wherever it may be 
found" and are antagonistic to "every great impulse 
of the kind that leads men to self-sacrifice and to won- 
der, or to a new world of ideal creation." These be 
brave words, full of sound and of the frothy order 
which captivates so many shallow minds. He could 



A FAMOUS REVIEWER 195 

not be popular; for, as Chesterton says: "the man who 
is popular must be optimistic about something, even 
if he is only optimistic about pessimism." Jeffrey was 
a Whig, and it is amusing to learn from one source 
that his radical views hampered his early life as a law- 
yer and from another that he was so ultra-conserva- 
tive as to entertain some regard and respect for the 
rights of property. It is conceded that he was an 
advocate of reform in the criminal laws, the game 
laws, the anti-Catholic laws, the abuses of Chancery, 
and the evils of colonial slavery. Yet because he was 
unwilling to throw up his cap wildly in acclaiming 
every scheme devised by unscrupulous agitators for 
the universal betterment of mankind — and incidentally 
for their own personal advancement and aggrandise- 
ment — he is called "pessimistic," and "aristocratic." 
His clear vision foresaw the coming of a time when the 
majority of men, possessing the maximum of all the 
meaner qualities of man, would awake to a sense of 
their power and under the guise of a pretended zeal for 
the improvement of the race and its conditions, would 
seek to appropriate for the benefit of the lazy, vicious 
and unthrifty, the rewards of integrity, intelligence, 
and industry. If he was opposed to "the doctrine of 
equality and every form of socialism," it was not be- 
cause he was aristocratic, in the ordinary meaning of 
the term, but because he was not deceived by false pro- 
phets and because he knew that the errors and faults of 
humanity cannot be eradicated by empty talk about the 
brotherhood of man and his indefinite perfectibility. 
He had no fondness for that equality which is secured 
by pulling down instead of by uplifting. 

On the whole, it may be said of him that he was 



196 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

an accomplished man; whose resources were always 
fully at his command; possessing no great inventive 
force, but a charm of speech and manner which en- 
abled him to exercise over those whom he met, what 
is popularly known as personal magnetism; too fas- 
tidious, perhaps, in many of his tastes, but endowed 
with a capacity of literary judgment usually just if not 
always infallible. He distrusted his own ability to give 
to the world a book that would survive him ; his critical 
faculties had been cultivated at the expense of the cre- 
ative faculty. A reviewer of the work of others, he 
would have reviewed his own with like fearlessness 
and discrimination. He did not choose to subject him- 
self to the later sneer of Disraeli and furnish another 
example of a critic who failed in literature. So we 
must seek his monument in the faded pages of the 
Edinburgh Review. 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 

WHEN Swift was only a few years past 
thirty he amused himself by preparing 
a code for his conduct "when he 
should come to be old," and one of 
his rules was "not to scorn present 
ways, or wits, or fashions, or men, or war." But ex- 
perience tells us that neither he nor any man who has 
passed the half-century mark and entered upon "com- 
mencing old age" ever followed that rule; it is a mere 
New Year resolve, made only to be broken. Perhaps 
it is not precisely "scorn" which is manifested by the 
elderly person, but rather disapproval, particularly 
if he has had a reasonable amount of success in life 
and has therefore acquired the habit of what is called 
"conservatism," — that is to say, the desire to keep 
things as they were because all went very well then. 
We utter a truism when we say that the nature of man 
remains substantially the same from generation to 
generation, and that manners change much, but men 
continue to be about as wise or as silly as their fathers 
were. We are all apt to derive much comfort from 
the notion that in some indefinite future everything 
is to be perfect, every human being is to think only of 
the welfare of his brother man or sister woman; pov- 
erty, misery, sin, and crime are to disappear; and all 
mankind are to dwell in a serene atmosphere of peace, 
love, and harmony, forgetting what Mr. Locke calls 
"the glorious duty of selfishness." It will be a dull 
and stupid life when that millenium is reached, but 

197 



198 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

there is consolation in the thought that it will come 
to us at about the time when we find the bag of gold 
at the foot of the rainbow. 

It was not surprising when at what in his custom- 
ary grandiloquence of phrase the newspaper report- 
ers styles "a banquet," I heard an eminent educator, 
of the "popular" variety, intimate that we must think 
only of the future, — not of the present or of the past. 
His approving audience applauded this sentiment vig- 
orously. I am not sure that I know exactly what he 
meant. If one does not think at all of the past, he 
must reduce his mind to comparative vacuity, relin- 
quish the "pleasures of memory," abandon the les- 
sons of experience, part with the emotions of grati- 
tude, patriotism, and filial affection; and if one does 
not think at all of the present, he is in much danger 
of being run over by a motor-car. In all likelihood 
the speaker did not intend to be taken literally; his 
utterance was only a bit of rhetorical exaggeration, 
which we often hear from orators after the sounding 
of the stroke of midnight. It is like the assertion of 
a distinguished University President, made on numer- 
ous occasions, to the effect that our boys should be 
brought up to be "as much unlike their fathers as pos- 
sible;" which amazing precept, if carried to its logical 
result, would require us to educate the son of a learned 
and pious divine to be wholly devoid of learning and 
thoroughly devoted to crime. He did not intend to 
violate the commandment about honoring one's father 
but, in his modesty, he merely wished to add to the 
decalogue a new commandment — "Forget thy father 
and thy mother and be like me." One trouble about 
these showy, banquet-bred generalizations is, that 
while they tickle the ears of the banqueters who have 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 199 

banqueted freely, they are seldom or never strictly 
true, and they do not look or sound as well on the 
morning after as they did in the glamour of the cigars 
and the champagne. Nevertheless "it is in the nature 
of the mind of man" according to Bacon, "to the ex- 
treme prejudice of knowledge to delight in the spaci- 
ous liberalities of generalities, as in a Champain re- 
gion, and not in the inclosures of particularity." We 
must not take the after-dinner speaker au pied de la 
lettre. There is much to be said in favor of contem- 
plating the future; but we had a Greek saying in my 
college days which I would like to give in the origi- 
nal, but refrain, because I have wholly forgotten my 
accents — "the future will be secure if your present 
work be well done." 

The famous Dean was right, in the main ; we should 
not scorn present ways, or wits, or fashions, or men, 
or war — although I am inclined to doubt whether we 
should not have a wholesome scorn of war, past, pres- 
ent or future, if war is what it was concisely, mono- 
syllablically and forcibly pronounced to be by the great 
soldier who marched through Georgia. Yet it may be 
permitted even to the middle aged to indulge in a little 
mild criticism; if everyone, young and old, should join 
in a chorus of approbation of everything, the monotony 
would be unendurable; it would be like the constant 
diet of candy to which the young Duke in Patience 
objected so strongly. One need not be scolding or 
finding fault all the time : but the only thing which is 
more odious than a confirmed pessimist is a persistent 
optimist. The moderate pessimist — if logically such 
a being may exist — has his uses. The sourness of the 
lemon adds to the palatability of the succulent oyster, 
or, to avail of a simile for which an apology is due to 



200 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

the enthusiastic prohibitionists of Maine and Kansas, 
the tinge of the bitters in the pre-prandial cocktail lends 
an indescribable charm to that reprehensible but pleas- 
ant beverage. As the author of "Excursions of a 
Book-Lover" said of late: 

"The optimist is good in his place, but as much 
may be said of the pessimist. Not always, but often, 
there is about the optimist a certain vulgarity not to 
be discovered in the pessimist. There is an offensive 
smacking of the lips over the good things of this life, 
and an indifference to the troubles of others that not 
infrequently render the optimist somewhat disgusting 
to men of finer nerve and kinder heart." 

But the optimist is "popular," and most men crave 
popularity. 

An excellent young American, then recently gradu- 
ated from one of our best colleges — which, with a fond 
but mistaken pride, we call "universities" — some years 
ago, in company with a fellow-American, was saunter- 
ing through the lovely gardens of New College, Ox- 
ford, and tempted by the smooth grass, reclined thereon 
while each indulged in the luxury of a cigar. To them 
appeared of a sudden a venerable guardian who, w^ith- 
out uttering a w^ord, beckoned mysteriously to them. 
Impressed by his age and majesty, they arose and were 
led by him beyond the gate, where he requested them 
to turn about and view that sculptured relic. "What 
do you see?" he asked in those sepulchral accents com- 
mon among venerable Britons in authority. They said 
that they had observed that gate and had admired its 
beauty. "But," said the solemn dignitary, "what do 
you read there?" They deciphered the inscription 
"Manners Makyth Man." "Gentlemen do not smoke 
in the gardens of New College," said the white-haired 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 201 

custodian. No doubt it was his favorite joke, well 
crusted by years of placid enjoyment. 

When William of Wykeham devised his celebrated 
motto he was not referring, as we know, to behavior 
towards others as much as to what the Roman friends 
of our youth, whom it is now unfashionable to mention, 
denominated mores — a course of life, morals in the 
largest sense. But there s a measure of truth in the 
construction of the wise saying adopted by the ancient 
keeper of New College Gardens. If the "manners" 
of the twentieth century "makyth man," the product is 
not particularly agreeable. But the manners of the 
nineteenth were no doubt as unpleasant to the stately 
folk of its predecessor, and so on ad infinitum : es- 
pecially the manners of the young people who are fol- 
lowing the course laid down for them by the great 
educator and are so absorbed in the study of the future 
that they have little time to think of the duties and pro- 
prieties of the present. 

Certain laws of decency may not be violated without 
causing decay or degeneracy in the moral fibre of the 
offenders. The youth of either sex who habitually dis- 
regard the obvious requirements of politeness — a word 
now almost obsolete — and who are absolutely uncon- 
scious of the rights and the feelings of others, are 
surely not to be expected to aid materially in the de- 
velopment of altruism, to devote themselves to pro- 
moting the good of mankind, or to accomplish much 
in advancing the cause of common humanity. The 
modern idea that young people, at least those of the 
more prosperous orders of society, are to be indulged 
to the top of their bent, that they are to be entertained 
and amused at the expense of their elders, that they are 
to have "a good time" because in due course they will 



202 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

become old and cannot, is largely the efficient cause of 
their folly and their indifference to the demands of 
ordinary courtesy. It is responsible for the misfor- 
tune that the majority of our young people, principally 
alas ! of our young women, are inclined to be vain, 
heedless, self-willed, and noisy. The conduct of a 
drove of them in public leads us to wonder if indeed 
these are the heirs of all the ages, the best result of our 
highly organized civilization. Now I must concede 
that the accusation is not new, for we find my Lord 
Chesterfield, writing in 1767 to his hopeful godson: 

('Learning without politeness makes a disagreeable 
Pedant, and politeness without learning makes a su- 
perficial frivolous Puppy. I am sorry to say that in 
general the Youth of the present age have neither. 
Their manners are illiberal, and their ignorance is 
notorious. They are sportsmen, they are jockeys, 
they know nor love nothing but dogs and horses, rac- 
ing and hunting." 

But he was writing only of the males: now we are 
doubling the offense of it, just as we are threatened 
with a doubling of the evils of universal suffrage by 
giving the so-called right of voting to the feminine half 
of the community. What Chesterfield wrote might 
well have been written to-day, with a few additions. 
The trouble always is that the offending do not care 
to please; to them it is a sad sacrifice of time and labor. 
As the same wise observer says : 

"The first great step toward pleasing is the desire 
to please, and whoever really desires it will please to 
a certain degree." 

But in our youthful sybarites of to-day the idea of 
pleasing any but their own dear selves is manifestly 
strange and abhorrent. 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 203 

Sport and play are good things in due moderation; 
but when the young men and women of any land think 
only of sports, devote their waking hours wholly to 
sports and play, can talk of nothing but sports and play, 
that land is doomed to decadence. All work and no 
play makes Jack a dull boy, we know ; but all play and 
no work makes Jack a very stupid and silly boy, and 
Jill comes tumbling after. 

Such assertions are naturally distasteful to the gen- 
eral; and whoever reads them will be inclined to cry 
out in contempt, if he deems them worthy of so much 
attention. Should any of our omniscient newspaper 
folk honor them with a word of comment, it will be 
Indignant, petulant, and abusive. For the newspaper 
is bound to flatter its readers: and a large portion of 
its daily contents consists of reports of games, sports, 
and "society intelligence" — the marriages of Daisy and 
Jack, George and Gladys, their attendants, their wed- 
ding gifts, and what they are going to do in the way 
of enjoying life after they have ended the honeymoon. 
We have pages on pages about base ball games, prize- 
fights, golf and tennis tournaments, automobile con- 
tests, competition in what is fantastically termed "avia- 
tion,"— all the ephemeral topics of "play." Soon we 
may have columns about hop-scotch and marbles. Let 
us be thankful however that the immense mass of it 
crowds out the chronicles of crime and the indecent de- 
tails of all sorts of occurrences which may better be 
buried In the latrines devoted to the purpose of hiding 
such rottenness from public view. 

But modern lack of politeness Is not due wholly to 
the spoiled children; the adults are little better. We 
have read of late some favor-currying screeds in our 
daily press written by cunning foreigners in order to 



204 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

win the good will and consequent pecuniary profit which 
attends the expression of well-devised flattery, in which 
it is asserted that New Yorkers are the most polite 
people on earth. That sort of talk usually elicits the 
unqualified approval of the flattered; but when Hop- 
kinson Smith dared to tell the truth he was denounced 
as severely as a public favorite ever is by the gentlemen 
of the newspapers. 

It is permissible to scold occasionally about minor 
things. I suppose that I am what is called "grouchy" 
— a word not to be found in the best dictionaries, but 
yet an admirable word, and one that most of us un- 
derstand ; although in my youth I would probably have 
associated it only w^ith that luckless Marshal of France 
who bore, justly or unjustly, the blame for the defeat 
of Napoleon at Waterloo. One manifestation of the 
rudeness of the day and of the growing disregard of 
considerations of propriety, may be trifling in itself but 
it is typical. Men, and commonly young men, now 
smoke in public or semi-public dining rooms when wo- 
men are present. This breach of the law of good man- 
ners is not peculiar to boys; I have seen with disgust 
a distinguished American diplomat indulging himself 
in this unpardonable assault upon the canons of good 
behavior. Smoking is not a grave offence when it is 
practised in a proper place : far be it from a confirmed 
smoker of nearly fifty years standing to utter a fanci- 
ful objection to it; but there are many otherwise so- 
ciable and admirable people to whom the odor of to- 
bacco and especially of cigarettes is exceedingly offen- 
sive, particularly when they are only half through 
dinner. The man who is most devoid not only of man- 
ners but of morals is the cigarette smoker who puffs 
the acrid, noisome fumes in your face at all times and 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 205 

In all seasons, even at your breakfast table, and adds 
insult by depositing the ashes and the ''butts" on the 
floor, on the table, on the library shelves, or in any 
place which may be convenient for him, however in- 
convenient it may be for his host, while the smoulder- 
ing, nauseating remnants poison your air and upset 
your digestion. For this shameless offender, boiling 
oil and melted lead are scarcely adequate punishments. 
Yet so common has become the gross abuse of smok- 
ing in dining rooms of hotels and restraurants, and 
even at meals in private houses, that hardly any one 
may be found at this day to raise his feeble voice in 
protest against it. It is a modern abomination, and in 
all shame and humility I confess that I have been guilty 
of it myself. 

There is another petty annoyance to which we may 
refer merely as a proof that men otherwise estimable 
enough are thoughtless regarding the natural rights of 
others. The telephone is one of the most serviceable 
and convenient nuisances of modern times. It is per- 
emptory czar, and when one is "rung up" there seems 
to be an absolute necessity of answering the call forth- 
with. Nine times out of ten the calling person — gen- 
erally summoning you on business more important to 
him than to you — after you have responded to the shrill 
girl who operates the machinery, compels you to wait 
until it suits his convenience to come to the transmitter; 
and there one sits, patiently or otherwise, wasting his 
own time, awaiting the pleasure of the lordly person- 
age who has disturbed him and who ought to have 
been ready at the instant. This particular exhibition 
of disgraceful effrontery is most common among the 
possessors of what my friend, the Complete Letter 
Writer of Wall Street, used to call "the unconscious 



2o6 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

insolence of conscious wealth." It is a sad reflection 
that chafe as we do under the inexcusable brutality of 
it, we generally submit to it chiefly because we hesitate 
to "make a fuss" over a serious abuse when we are com- 
pelled to endure so much greater ones; but it arouses 
flames of wrath and I am always trying to plan an ef- 
fective method of rebuke. When people send tickets 
for "charitable entertainments" and ask us to return 
them if we do not pay for them we take our revenge 
by throwing tickets and all in the waste basket; but I 
do not know exactly what to do about the odious man 
who "telephones" and compels me to wait for him. 
Some day there will be an assassination and a verdict 
of justifiable homicide. 

The luckless person who is obliged to ride in our 
street cars or to walk upon our thoroughfares must 
recognize the sad truth that in order to preserve his equi- 
librium or to proceed with an ordinary amount of com- 
fort he must exercise that eternal vigilance which is 
said to be the price of liberty. On the cars, one must 
not expect of course any thoughtful regard on the part 
of any passenger for the convenience or the comfort of 
any other passenger, or even any respect for laws and 
ordinances. I am referring chiefly to New York and 
Philadelphia, for there is a better state of affairs in 
Boston and even a worse condition in Chicago, where 
most of the passengers are mere ordinary thugs. Men 
— and women too — crowd the rear platform when there 
is abundant room inside, preventing entrance or exit, 
the male offender generally puffing a cigar made of 
near-tobacco, an offence prohibited by law, but nobody 
seems to have the courage to call for the enforcement 
of the law, mainly because our learned and discrimina- 
ting Police Magistrates appear to have a contemptuous 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 207 

opinion of the complainant in such cases and he is usually 
lucky if he escapes without sarcastic comments upon his 
absurdly finical temperament, duly reported in the news- 
papers with admiring glee. Those who have seats es- 
tablish themselves in such a position as to occupy the 
place of two, and seldom or never make room for in- 
comers. The strap-hangers infest the rear of the ve- 
hicle in order to cause the greatest amount of trouble 
for the others, and are indignant at a modest request 
to "move up;" and those seated ones who do not sprawl 
about in an effort to look out of the window, cross their 
legs and obstruct the aisle. The women commonly take 
up room beside them with boxes and bundles, oblivious 
of those who are obliged to stand. If any one enters 
or departs by the front door, he rarely closes it after 
him. In short, no consideration for others is exhibited 
except in one instance; men still offer a seat to a wo- 
man who has a child in her arms. 

/On the sidewalks the shambling cubs persistently 
shuffle along, usually on the wrong side, and when a 
hapless pedestrian happens to be going in an opposite 
direction, he is generally shoved into the gutter. Down 
town, since the advent of the feminine stenographers 
and typewriters, those gentle, soft-voiced, over-dressed 
creatures crowd the walks and promenade three or four 
abreast while they shriek their amatory or sartorial con- 
fidences to one another and monopolize the pavement, 
regardless of the progress of those who are forced to 
encounter their serried ranks. The familiar device of 
setting one's shoulder firmly to meet the onset of the 
cub cannot be resorted to as against the type-writer 
mob; and the unhappy wayfarer meekly betakes him- 
self to the middle of the street where he braves the ter- 
rors of the lordly truck-driver and the haughty chauf- 



208 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

feur, and stumbles over the cart of the foreign fruit- 
vendor who, for some inscrutable reason, is allowed to 
occupy, free of charge, large portions of the public do- 
main in the transaction of his personal and private busi- 
ness and abounds mostly in our narrowest and most 
crowded roadways. 

I plead guilty to being a sour, ill-tempered, elderly 
gentleman, unable to find amusement and delight in 
submitting to the trivial insults of the merry creatures 
who think that any caitiff who resents their ill-behavior 
must be a hopeless misanthrope. Why, my friend, 
should you complain about little things like these, which 
make me so happy? Why do you grumble when I turn 
over the seat in the railway car so that I may monopo- 
lize four places, one for my valise, one for my golfing 
outfit, and two for my sacred person while you stand 
abashed and wistful, tossed about much, like the pious 
^neas, as the train dashes over the curves? Why do 
you utter sniffs of disgust when I open the window as 
we enter the long tunnel, in order that free admission 
may be afforded for the coal-gas and the smoke? What 
if the sum of such trifles makes up a good deal of the 
misery of existence? It is your misery, not mine, and 
you are a mouldering relic of a vanished time when 
men wished to please, and therefore practised the art 
of politeness. 

As far as the misuse of our roads and streets is con- 
cerned, the fiend of the motor-cycle and the monarch 
of the automobile are the most oppressive and tyran- 
nical. The ordinarily decent citizen becomes utterly des- 
titute of morals when he is in control of a motor-car, 
wrapped in his own mantle of unrestricted power. We 
submit meekly to be driven into the ditch, to be covered 
by the dust, to be deafened by his hideous "honks," and 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 209 

to be stifled by his unnecessary smoke. We are grate- 
ful if when he has run us down and mutilated our un- 
offending bodies, he will condescend to pick us up and 
carry us to the nearest hospital. In absolute disregard 
of others, the hired chauffeur is far surpassed by the 
owner — or the owner's son. That is why, when I am 
trudging along the highway and behold an approaching 
car whose owner is in charge of its movements, I gen- 
erally climb a tree. No doubt when I own a motor-car 
myself, my extreme views on the subject may be slightly 
modified. 

' The decay of good manners may be due in part to 
an over-estimate of the value of what are called "demo- 
cratic ideals" which are no new things, and which as 
understood in these times, are based upon the precept 
that you should love your neighbor as yourself — if he 
has a vote — but that your neighbor is in no way bound 
to love you, unless you go a little further and let him 
kick you when he is so inclined. The gospel of equal- 
ity among men is preached to us with much fervor and 
insistence, particularly by clergymen, college professors, 
and candidates for office. I am not in accord with Fran- 
cis Parkman when he spoke of modern democracy as 

'^organized ignorance, led by unscruplous craft, and 
marching, amid the applause of fools, under the flag of 
equal rights." 

It is needless to get as excited about it as all that. 
There is no real objection to it, although it is partly 
founded upon a fallacious interpretation of one of Mr. 
Jefferson's "glittering generalities;" it has a grand 
sound and it is pleasing to most of those who listen to 
it. When we reflect upon it with coolness, we know 
that men are not and cannot be equal in everything. No 



210 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

legislation can make them equal in thrift, in morals, in 
virtue, or in intellect. Equality of opportunity may 
perhaps be ensured by man-made laws, but they must 
be better framed than our laws generally are. The dif- 
ferences among men were created by the fiat of the Al- 
mighty, a decree of higher force than even the judg- 
ment of the great tribunal in Washington — pronounced 
by a divided court. Conceding however that every 
man is as good as every other man, one of the diffi- 
culties to be found in the results of the disinterested 
efforts of our apostles of equality is that the uncultured 
person appears to entertain the opinion that it is neces- 
sary, in order to maintain his equality with the cultured, 
to domineer over him, to put him down, to humiliate 
him. It may be that in the work of making the world 
perfect we should compel the educated and refined to 
abate something of their refinement, so as not to of- 
fend the others; but it seems unprofitable to exalt the 
vulgar merely to preserve a so-called equality. The 
honest son of toil who dons a clean shirt once a w^eek 
and indulges in a bath twice a year, is fully as deserving 
as the luxurious mortal who changes his shirt twice a 
day and has his cold plunge every morning, but must 
we bow down to him and adore him because of his noble 
indifference to the mere luxuries of fresh linen and pure 
water? For pity's sake, mes camarades, as our own 
great Walt would call you, have a little tolerance for 
the clean; do not boast yourselves so greatly of your 
superiority of simplicity. Do not despise those who de- 
light in books, for example. We know that it is a mis- 
erable weakness to be fond of books, but pray do not 
crush us worms under your iron heels for so trivial an 
offence. Have some regard for our poor tastes and 
preferences; it is not incumbent upon you to trample on 



MANNERS MAKYTH MAN 211 

us in order to make us your equals. We do not com- 
plain of most of your ways and customs, of your fond- 
ness for certain strenuous forms of diversion, of your 
mode of speech, or even of your manifest purpose of 
extortion when you deal with our property. We ask 
only that you should give your lofty consideration now 
and then to what is commonly called "The Golden 
Rule." Really, it is a good rule; Congress has not yet 
abolished it as constituting an improper restriction upon 
the freedom of interstate commerce ; but that may come 
to pass. Even our later Presidents have not framed 
and thrust upon our intelligent legislators any bill to do 
away with it or to modify it in accordance with popular 
demand in the West, so as to read: 

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto 
you, provided however that in doing it unto others 
you shall require the others to submit in all respects 
■ to the wishes and preferences of the majority of the 
qualified voters in the land, including all Italians, 
Hungarians, Scandinavians and other emigrants and 
every ignorant being in the country except Indians not 
taxed." 

We know that the cry of the day is, in substance : 

^^'^Uherty and Humbug, now and forever, one and 
inseparable." 

But be careful lest in your high-minded aspiration 
to be so much the equals of the "better classes," you 
succeed in putting them so far under you, that you de- 
stroy the government which protects you in your place 
of eminence; and in your effort to tax property to the 
utmost you may sooner or later be unable to find any 
property to tax. 

Manners makyth man; the lack of them makyth 
— something quite different. 



THE WAR ON THE COLLEGES 

IT is undoubtedly reprehensible rashness in an or- 
dinary person, untrained in the profession of 
pedagogy to express views about so grave a 
matter as education. The expert men who de- 
vote their energies exclusively to the task 
of training the youthful mind are apt to eye 
with justifiable jealousy or indignation the at- 
tempt of the outsider to invade their peculiar pro- 
vince, and their prohibitory signs are as manifest to the 
beholder as are those in the Central Park which warn 
the heedless to "keep off the grass." But the average 
American has a way of bestowing upon mankind the 
boon of his own opinions, whether in regard to poli- 
tics, economics, science, or religion, without much hesi- 
tancy about his own competence, in which respect he 
is not unlike his fellow-beings of other nationalities; 
and after he has reached an age when he begins to 
lead what Mr. Benson calls "a life of reflection, rather 
than of action, of contemplation rather than of busi- 
ness," he begins to feel that it is not always those who 
are engaged in the turmoil of the battle who are most 
capable of judging the merits of the campaign and that 
the unconcerned spectator may be able to arrive at 
sound conclusions with as much accuracy and clear- 
ness as the one who is in the thick of the fight; at least, 
that is his own judgment. 

We are passing through a season of much uneasiness 
among those who are occupied in the business of edu- 
cation, particularly about our colleges, which we persist 

213 



214 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

is calling "universities," whether or not they are pos- 
sessed of university equipment. The heads of these in- 
stitutions, with a few worthy exceptions, appear to be 
the most distrustful concerning the efficacy of their own 
labors. Naturally the great body of the uneducated, 
delighting to hear from such unimpeachable authority 
that the colleges are not what they ought to be and that 
the boasted education which colleges are supposed to 
furnish is of little worth, indulge in much self-gratula- 
tion over the fact that they never wasted their time 
upon such a trifle; while the newspapers, who aim to 
please the majority, swell the chorus of censure and 
crow lustily over the folly of spending valuable years in 
acquiring something which "is of no use" to the ambi- 
tious individual seeking for wealth, or power, or what- 
ever the man of the day most covets. Behold the fall 
of him who has presumed to look down on "the com- 
mon people" because he was possessed of an education 
which turns out to be only a sham! And the voice of 
the common people is divine; yet I could never per- 
ceive the wisdom of the remark attributed to Lincoln, 
to the effect that God must have greatly loved the com- 
mon people because he made so many of them; for 
that might with equal wisdom be said of mosquitoes or 
of the ordinary house-fly. 

One of the consequences of these apologetic out-giv- 
ings of some of our presidents has been the out-pour- 
ing of the spirit of a few of the persons who hang upon 
the outskirts of education. At a recent assemblage in 
Boston of what is styled, with the customary grandeur, 
"The National Education Association," the principal 
of a New York High School and the Superintendent of 
Public Schools in Wisconsin delivered themselves with 
portentous wisdom of such observations as these : 



THE WAR ON THE COLLEGES 215 

"There is no spectacle in American life to-day more 
pitiful than the contrast between what the college ad- 
vertises to do and what it performs." "The teach- 
ing by our college professors is the poorest in the 
country." "The average third-year boy in the high 
school is more able to think, discuss and express an 
idea than the average college student two years older." 
"The young man learns in college that he need not 
work; he comes to regard his college as a social and 
sporting club." "Colleges with their narrow and 
false ideals of culture * * * their domination 
has reached a degree of intolerable impertinence." 
"The high schools in desperation have been drawing 
a line of cleavage between those fitting for college and 
those who are not. This is unnecessary, unfitting, 
and undemocratic." 

After such luminous remarks it is not surprising that 
the distinguished fragment of this Association, known 
as "The Department of Secondary Education," adopted 
a resolution declaring that there should be a recog- 
nition as electives in college-entrance requirements "of 
all subjects well taught in the high schools" — manual 
training, commercial branches, and agriculture; and the 
requirement of two languages in addition to English 
was forcibly denounced. The force of folly could no 
further go. The Evening Post, in an editorial article of 
comment, justly says : — 

"That situation represents the culmination of a 
wave of criticism and restlessness which in large meas- 
ure owes its strength and volume to what we cannot 
but feel has been a want of perception, on the part 
of many of our leading college presidents especially, 
of the issue really involved in the agitation about our 
colleges which has for some years been so much to 
the fore. To be conscious of deficiencies, ready to 
admit them and anxious to remedy them, is one thing; 
it is quite another to assume a position of apologetic 



2i6 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

defensiveness, to talk as though the faults of the col- 
lege were all there was In the institution, to declare that 
the college is useless unless It devotes itself to a task 
quite other than that for which it has stood in the 
past. And yet this is essentially the attitude in which 
more than one of our leading college presidents has 
allowed himself to be placed. They should have 
known— we hardly think they can have actually real- 
ized It — that such talk as this means not the Improve- 
ment of the college, but Its abolition; not greater ef- 
ficiency In attaining the aims to which it has his- 
torically been devoted, but the abandonment of those 
aims. 

Now, the fact Is that a great deal of the stuff that 
Is talked about colleges by such persons as those from 
whom the above quotations are made Is simply rub- 
bish. There are, of course, young men who go to col- 
lege and don't work, but to talk as though this were 
true of all of them, or of a majority of them, Is to 
fly In the face of the simplest observation. Very much 
the greater part of the young men in our colleges work 
as hard at their studies as can reasonably be expected. 
As for the superiority of the third-year high school 
boy to the college youth two years older, this is, of 
course, a mere personal assertion. And the terrible 
hardships of differentiating between courses designed 
to be followed by a college training and those that 
are not, rests, so far as we can see, upon the idea that 
a college has no rights that a true democrat is bound 
to respect. It may be that the objects which a col- 
lege pursues are not worth pursuing; but so long as it 
does pursue them, It must of necessity demand, on the 
part of entering students, such preparation as is neces- 
sary for their attainment." 

The substance of the accusations made against our 
colleges seems to be that their courses of Instruction do 
not tend to develop strong, earnest workers or to "fit 
young men for the toils and struggles of active life"; 



THE WAR ON THE COLLEGES 217 

at least that is about all I am able to make out of the 
multitude of words with which we are deluged by the 
discontented and chiefly by some of our college and 
university presidents. It is unfortunate that the heads 
of our "institutions of learning" think that it is in- 
cumbent on them to undertake the improvement of the 
world instead of giving their chief attention to the dis- 
charge of their immediate duties; and they exhibit a 
strong inclination to become autocratic and dictatorial 
as if, forsooth, their accidental elevation to the place 
of head-teachers imposed upon them the labor of regu- 
lating everything and everybody. In this respect they 
certainly surpass such old-fashioned presidents as Mark 
Hopkins, Noah Porter, and James McCosh, who did 
some good work in the cause of education, although 
they did not devote much time to the business of "up- 
lifting," or rather of perpetually talking about it to mis- 
cellaneous audiences. There is one other charge; it is 
said that the colleges foster idleness and exclusiveness, 
producing mere dilettanti. A dilettante is, I believe, 
"a lover or admirer of the fine arts," and not altogether 
an abandoned wretch or a moral outcast. Rather an 
extensive observation of college graduates during the 
past quarter of a century has not disclosed to me any 
considerable number of dilettanti. I have generally 
found them to be earnest and conscientious men, at all 
events those of the professions. Most of this talk 
about aristocracy and exclusiveness, luxury, lavish ex- 
penditure and lazy self-indulgence among college stu- 
dents is pure tw^addle. In every large body of young 
men there will be idlers and spendthrifts, and the pro- 
portion of them will be about as great as that which is 
found in the entire community. As to "luxury," ideas 
change with the progress of time. When I entered col- 



21 8 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

lege over forty years ago, my father thought me "luxu- 
rious" because I had a carpet in my room; and it was 
a very cheap carpet at that. To the survivors of that 
time, what are necessities now seem to be luxuries, but 
yet they are not exactly sybaritic; facilities for bathing, 
for example — and other facilities. The men who were 
graduated in those days were none the worse perhaps 
for their lack of comforts ; nor does it seem to me that 
the graduates of to-day are any the worse for having 
them. Are these young men of the twentieth century 
inferior to their ancestors? If they are, we are obliged 
to infer that the system of college training then pre- 
valent must have been more efficient than it is now, and 
that the modern improvements of which we have been 
so proud have not been improvements at all; that the 
millions on millions of money extracted from pluto- 
cratic pockets have been obtained on false pretenses and 
have been virtually wasted in perceptorial extravagances. 
As to aristocratic exclusiveness, I will have something 
to say later. 

I assert with much indignation that the charge 
that "the young man learns in college that he need not 
work" and that "he comes to regard his college as a 
social and sporting club" is false and silly, the creation 
either of ignorance, or of malice; and I am sorry for 
the unfortunate lads whom necessity compels to attend 
public schools or high schools controlled by such 
persons as those who are guilty of disseminating the 
libels proclaimed at the meeting in Boston. 

We know that the college curriculum has been vastly 
enlarged in scope, the courses of study improved, and 
the opportunities of students immeasurably increased. 
To say that "the teaching by our college professors is 
the poorest in the country" is a contemptible slur that is 



THE WAR ON THE COLLEGES 219 

sufficient to discredit all the allegations of the high- 
schopl orator. The age of matriculation has been ad- 
vanced, thereby delaying the time of graduation and 
postponing the beginning of the earning period, in or- 
der that preparation may be more thorough and the 
men better fitted to avail of their greater opportuni- 
ties. But, to leave the high-school apostles for the mo- 
ment, all this, according to some of our presidents, 
does not result in producing men really superior to the 
graduates of a generation or more ago. If that is so, 
if the new men are no wiser or stronger than their 
predecessors, then it is manifest that the "old education" 
which we used to enjoy is not to be sneered at, and that, 
after all, it may not be prudent to bring up young men 
to be "as much unlike their fathers as possible." 

Well, as far as that is concerned, much depends on 
your point of view and the "point of view" at present 
is mainly of those who are convinced that nothing in 
life is so important as to "push" and "get ahead." 
There is much vague talk, principally rhetorical, and 
largely made up of those well-sounding platitudes about 
uplifting humanity, and devoting ourselves to the na- 
tion's service, and abstaining from the pursuit of riches, 
and sternly devoting ourselves to obedience to such 
laws, for example, as those which forbid one to enclose 
a letter in an express package, and striving for the tri« 
umph of those charmingly indefinite "democratic 
ideals," the precise nature whereof we are not much en- 
lightened about, because the orator scorns details. It all 
means, however, that there is but one thing needful 
for man — unrest; for if you rest, even for a moment, 
you are sure to be passed in the race, life being merely 
a race. I am tempted to quote from Mr. Benson's es- 



2 20 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

say on "Contentment," for he dares to say what most of 
us are timid about saying: 

"The gospel that I detest," he says, "is the gospel 
of success, the teaching that every one ought to be 
discontented with his setting, that a man ought to get 
to the front, clear a space around him, eat, drink, 
make love, cry and strive and fight. It is all to be at 
the expense of feebler people. That is a detestable 
Ideal, because it is the gospel of tyranny rather than 
the gospel of equality. * * * -pj^g result of it is 
the lowest kind of democratic sentiment, which says, 
'Every one is as good as every one else, and I am a 
little better,' and the jealous spirit, which says, 'If I 
cannot be prominent, I will do my best that no one 
else shall be.' " 

He calls our attention to the custom of disguising 
rank individualism under a pretense of desiring to im- 
prove social conditions : 

"The clean handed social reformer, who desires no 
personal advantage, and whose influence is a matter 
of anxious care, is one of the noblest of men; but now 
that schemes of social reform are fashionable, there 
are a number of blatant people who use them for pur- 
poses of personal advancement. What I rather de- 
sire is to encourage a very different kind of individual- 
Ism, the Individualism of the man who realizes that the 
hope of the race depends upon the quality of life, upon 
the number of people who live quiet, active, gentle, 
kindly, faithful lives, enjoying their work and turning 
for recreation to the nobler and simpler sources of 
pleasure — the love of nature, poetry, literature and 
art." 

Of course this is all very old-fashioned and con- 
temptible ; it tends to luxury and to exclusiveness, and is 
suitable only to the wretched minority. 



THE WAR ON THE COLLEGES 221 

Now, in spite of the fact that the gospel of stren- 
uousness, so loudly proclaimed by the man who enjoys 
the distinction of being the most famous of living Amer- 
icans, is the one which appeals most forcibly to the 
popular mind, there is an element of vulgarity about 
it which does not commend it to the few who consider 
that there are virtues in the quiet and useful life as well 
as in the noisy, showy life ; and there are such things as 
"nature, poetry, literature, and art," as well as steam, 
electricity, and improvement of the condition of the day 
laborer; and that there is something beyond the mere 
doing of things which, aided or unaided by the doer, 
find their way into the columns of the daily press. Take 
literature, for example. One of our most celebrated 
University Presidents has said: 

"It is plain that you cannot impart 'university 
methods' to thousands, or create 'investigators' by the 
score, unless you confine your university education to 
matters which dull men can investigate, your labora- 
tory training to tasks which mere plodding diligence 
and submissive patience can compass. Yet, if you do 
so limit and constrain what you teach, you thrust 
taste and insight and delicacy of perception out of the 
schools, exalt the obvious and the merely useful above 
the things which are only imaginatively or spiritually 
conceived, make education an affair of tasting, and 
handling, and smelling, and so create Philistia, that 
country in which they speak of 'mere literature.' "* 

But if you may not teach this love of literature, for 
its own sake, by rule and formula, in the arid quarters 
of the class room, you may, if you know how, create 
an appropriate atmosphere in which this love may be 
fostered and developed, and it is not an atmosphere of 



*Woodrow Wilson: "Mere Literature," 1896. 



222 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

agriculture, commercial branches and veterinary sur- 
gery. If the chief aim of our colleges is to bring up 
what are called "men of action," publicists, politicians, 
pedagogues, scientific discoverers, and social reformers, 
then the Philistine will dominate and Gradgrind will 
triumph. Where the atmosphere is essentially ultili- 
tarian, you will never cultivate the flowers of "mere 
literature." The man who has what was once called 
a "liberal education," that which ought to be had by 
every one who deserves the "grand old name of gen- 
tleman," is like him who has a deep and abiding fond- 
ness for animated creation which does not find expres- 
sion in the killing of birds and animals under the speci- 
ous pretence of a devotion to the study of "faunal na- 
ture." 

The gentlemen of the high-school class have a great 
horror of what we call "the classics." For many years 
it has been the cry of the utilitarian, 

"What is the good of Latin and Greek? Of what use 
are they to men of strength, and force, and lofty as- 
piration?" 

So in deference to outcry, for we yield habitually to 
the views of those who make the most noise, the study 
of those languages has almost ceased and that of science 
occupies the primacy. Perhaps this circumstance has 
contributed largely to the diminution in the number of 
scholarly men of general cultivation. In their place 
we have chemists, engineers, and electricians; men of 
great capacity and usefulness; but there is no good 
reason why they should not be men of culture as well 
as the lawyers, clergymen and physicians, and no doubt 
some of them are. In their technical training they need 
not deprive themselves of that general culture which 
a college education was meant to give and ought to 



THE WAR ON THE COLLEGES 223 

give, so that all who have had its benefits may have 
some common ground on which to meet. It is not 
necessary that all of them should be skillful Latinists 
or Grecians, but no one can justly be called a scholar 
who has no knowledge whatever of Greek or Latin. 
He may be a good chemist, engineer or electrician, and 
he may be possessed of genius, but he will not be an 
educated man in the broad sense. It is no answer to 
say that there are great men who knew not a word of 
those languages. It might as well be said that no one 
need know anything of the Bible because Plato and 
Socrates never knew anything of it; or that no man 
should ever "go to college" because Benjamin Frank- 
lin and Abraham Lincoln never did. The inquiry 
whether Lincoln would have been what he was if he 
had been a college man always seemed to me to be 
profitless. If he had been educated as a soldier, a phy- 
sician, or a theologian he might not have been Presi- 
dent, but that does not prove that we should not have 
soldiers, or doctors, or ministers. One might as well 
conjecture what his life would have been if he had been 
born in a city instead of in a Kentucky log cabin. 

I am aware that the method of teaching "the 
classics" which treats them merely as vehicles for im- 
parting a knowledge of grammar or etymology is 
worthless. There has been too much of that and too 
many questions such as the famous one "who dragged 
whom how many times around the walls of what?" 
Such abominations have disgusted generations of pupils 
and made them "comprehend, but never love" the liter- 
ature of Greece and Rome. But there are remedies for 
such evils. 

The humor of the situation lies in the fact that the 
assailants of our colleges — insiders as well as outsiders 



224 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

— seem to think that there is a vested right in the mul- 
titude to have a college education, and that particular 
form of education with which the multitude is pleased. 
They ignore the right of the minority to seek the cul- 
ture which that minority desires, and to have a college 
where it may enjoy its own form of education. I do not 
deny that my fellow-being who craves the "commercial 
branches," manual training, agriculture, veterinary sur- 
gery and all that, is entitled to go where such things are 
taught, but I deny his right to drag me there with him, 
and to deprive me of what used to be called "the hu- 
manities" — liberal studies. He may be just as good 
a man as I am — perhaps a much better man than I can 
hope to be — but I do not admit his right to compel me 
to associate with him if his tastes, manners, and per- 
sonal qualities are not agreeable to me. He may call 
me "aristocratic" and "exclusive" if I prefer culture to 
mere utility, and to choose my own friends; but if I 
am forced to attend a college or a university where I 
am constrained by law to fraternize with him, then 
there is no true democracy about it; it is tyranny, as 
Mr. Benson says. My individual liberty of choice is 
destroyed. Why he should want to live with me against 
my will, I cannot divine ; I should think he would find 
it as uncomfortable as I should. If Doe, an aspiring 
devotee of useful studies, insists upon having a college 
where Roe is obliged to associate with him, willy-nilly 
— a situation he will never find in the world after his 
graduation — let him have it, but he will fail in one es- 
sential point— Roe will not go there. If Roe selects a 
university which is more or less "exclusive," as every 
true university must be. Doe has no right to demand 
that he, too, shall be admitted there on his own terms 
and have everything changed to suit his preferences. 



THE WAR ON THE COLLEGES 225 

The idea that because all men in our land have equal 
political rights they have likewise equal social rights is 
not democratic; it is socialistic. If I want to ride in 
a Pullman car instead of in an ordinary coach, I mean 
to do it unless I am prohibited from so doing by some 
legislative enactment ; and to that extent will be as un- 
democratic as I please. 

Far be it from an humble person like myself to as- 
sert that the noble task of solving the great social prob- 
lems of the day should be shunned and avoided by our 
university men; but there are other things in life. 
There is room for all the workers, but there must be 
some room also for the gentle scholars who love the less 
vigorous forms of reflection and thought. There is 
room for the scholar who does not trouble his soul with 
envious feelings toward those who are more largely 
blessed — or cursed — with riches. Too much stress is 
laid upon the sorrows of the poor young man who thinks 
that he is wronged by those who, having more money 
and different associations, are not disposed to embrace 
him and to call him brother. The tastes of men, young 
and old, are various; the college world is not and can- 
not be made to be wholly different from the world in 
general. Young men as well as their elders will and 
must select their own companions, their own fields of 
usefulness, their own objects of endeavor, interest and 
ambition. According to my own observation, the lads 
form friendships in college with very little concern 
about the matter of wealth; the element of snobbish- 
ness is lacking in them. But they will not be coerced 
into familiar association with any one. 

"The culture and manurance of minds in youth,'* 
said Bacon, "hath such a forcible, though unseen oper- 
ation, as hardly any length of time or contraction of 



226 EDGEHILL ESSAYS 

labor can countervail It afterwards." But it must be 
an intellectual preparation, and our professors need 
not expect to make human nature over again or essen- 
tially different from what it has always been; they 
must seek to guide men and not to re-create them. 

Let no one say that I mean to ignore the moral and 
the ethical; they are comprehended in the intellectual. 
The doctrinaires and the visionaries of the day are wed- 
ded to the delusion that there are no ethics or morals 
except the socialistic; those who disagree with them 
are thrust aside with the sneering epithets of "aristo- 
crat" and "patrician." There were ethics before Em- 
ma Goldman and morals before Karl Marx. True de- 
mocracy is not the rule of the rabble; it is the rule of 
the people of sound sense and wisdom. We want no 
"politics" in our colleges. Let our college leaders ab- 
stain from politics, which distract their minds from 
their legitimate work and lure them into the perilous 
regions of demagogy. Political ambition has spoiled 
many good lawyers ; it has ruined some promising uni- 
versity presidents. 



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